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HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 




. Mz 






HUMOUR AND PATHOS; 



OR, 



ESSAYS, SKETCHES, AND TALES 



GfHfWYTHEN BAXTER, 

Author of " Modern Refinement" &c- #<?• 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS, 



FRANK HOWARD, Esa. 



" The smiles, the tears, of boyhood years, 
The words of love then spoken — 
The eyes that shone, now dimm'd and gone ; 
The cheerful hearts now broker. !" 

Moore's Irish Melodies. 



LONDON : 
GEORGE ROUTLEDGE, RYDER'S COURT, 

LEICESTER SQUARE. 
1842. 



-pi? 4r**rt 



.^ 



^H* 



INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. 



In giving the accompanying trifles to the world, the 
author thinks it fair to acknowledge that several of them 
have, at different periods, appeared in the columns of 
"The Original," " Tait's Magazine" " The Metropolitan 
Conservative Journal" and other periodicals. 

Furthermore, in justification of the almost misan- 
thropical feeling which he is told pervades some of the 
articles and the humourous abandonment which charac- 
terises others — he thinks it proper to state, that the 
first were written in hours of bitterness — the last in 
moments of a more joyous mood. Of the bitterness 
which dictated the former, the cause may now be re- 
moved, — and the gaiety which excited the latter, per- 
chance may now no longer exist, — but with either 
speculation the public has nothing to do, — for to 
afford pleasure and instruction on the author's side — 
and support and approval on the Reader's — is all that 
the twain have necessarily to do with each other. In 
the present case, may (hopes the inditer of the follow- 
ing pages) the beneficial results be equivalent ! 



VI 



Having prefaced thus far, the author wishes it per- 
fectly to be understood by his readers, that nothing 
which the newspapers designate " intense interest/' or 
" high wrought " descriptions, will be found in his 
pages ; — for he has no visions of damsels with dulci- 
mers to relate — no wondrous tales of Alroy to tell. 
In a word, he has only a few sweet and bitter fancies 
— a handful of humourous and earnest conceits to 
offer. 

And even in those, he wishes it also to be borne in 
mind, he is well aware that his style has nothing to 
distinguish it from a host of the Sketch Books and 
Miscellanies of his predecessors in the same line of 
composition ; — saving, indeed, that he may have, in the 
vanity of a young aspirant, occasionally worn his lite- 
rary foraging cap cocked on one side ; and, perhaps, 
more unwarrantably, (as his present lucubrations may 
verify) stuck the humour of his thirty or "forty fancies" 
in it for a feather. 

To his readers, he has nothing further to say. But 
to his reviewers, he would address a few words — viz. 
touch this volume gently, for there is a 

" spirit in the leaves !" 

and that spirit is the spirit of entreaty and implores 
your forbearance ! 



April, 1838. 



CONTENTS. 



N.B. Those distinguished by * have already appeared in "Tail's 
Magazine," " The Original," and other Periodicals. 



PAGE. 

Take Warning 1 

* The Old Year, 1834 9 

The Ill-used Wife 20 

Keep your Distance 25 

Wales and the Welsh 30 

The Hard Steak 35 

The Misanthrope 42 

Rings 54 

Apropos, and Malapropos 63 

Diary of a Detenu for Debt 72 

The Returned Letters 83 

* Kiddyism 90 

* Natural Deformity 103 

* The Decline of Heart Breaking in England 110 

Blight of Early Hopes 123 

The Actress 127 

Something Stiff 138 

* Early Impressions 1 43 

* The Guardsman 148 



Vlll CONTENTS. 

PAGE. 

* The Lost Bride 156 

* Principle and Interest 1 69 

The Old Man's Tale 175 

Puns and Punning 182 

* Byron and his Biographers 195 

* Names 197 

* The Best Heart in the World 205 

Mrs. Watkins's Party 212 

* The Drinking Party 222 

* Genius and Authors 224 

Our Village ; or, the Wanderer's Return 232 

The Sublime and the Ridiculous 251 

A Welsh Watering Place 260 



TAKE WARNING! 



" Caesar, beware of Brutus ; take heed of Cassius ; come not 
near Casca; have an eye to Cinna; trust not Trebonius; mark well 
Metellus Cimber; Decius Brutus loves thee not; thou hast wronged 
Caius Ligarius. There is but one mind in all these men, and it is 
bent against Caesar. If thou be'st not immortal, look about you ; 
security gives way to conspiracy. The mighty Gods defend thee ! 
Thy lover, Artemidorus.'' — Julius Caesar. 



Take warning! — Half the "accidents and offences" 
that enliven the columns of our newspapers originate 
in the disregard of this precept. People take snuff, 
colds, wine, steps, tea, wives, offence, hints, fright and 
medical advice ; but they cannot — they will not — take 
warning ! — and par consequence, they incontinently 
get hanged, drunk, drowned, shot, horse -whipped and 
ridiculed, &c; — are thrown out of windows, and off 
coaches, kick up and are kicked down, &c. &c. While 
as a sequitur, adulteries, law-suits, duels, murders, 
black eyes, &c. ensue. Hector would not take warning, 

B 



2 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

so he circumgyrated, (served him right!) like a canister 
at a puppy's tail, the walls of his own Ilium. Caesar was 
equally wrongheaded; indeed, more so, seeing that he, 
like Mrs. Piozzi's terra filius, had " warnings three 
times over/' viz. one from his wife, another from the 
soothsayer, and a third from Artemidorus the sophist, 
of Cnidos; besides portents and omens, ad lib. and, 
as might have been expected from his contumacy, he 
was made a pin-cushion of, by the spirited exertions of 
the liberal party of those days ; his most particular 
friend, being Leader of the opposition. — " But then/' 
says a master of ceremonies, " it would have been 
infra dig. for the son and heir of ' Old Glory,' to have 
attended to the tittle tattle of a ' foolish, dreaming, 
superstitious girl;' and who, to boot, was not exactly 
right in her upper story, ' a little cracked, or so.' And 
was the man, who, as a certain exaggerating fellow, one 
Will Shakspeare, has told us, bestrode 

' the narrow world, 

Like a Colossus,' 

to tie up his knocker, and sham Abraham, because, for- 
sooth, his wife had bad dreams; the inevitable conse- 
quence, of course, of reading some ' Mysteries of 
Udolpho' sort of tale the night before? " 

Again, to descend more to our own times. — Had 
Richard II. undeafed his ear to the wholesome council 
of his uncle, and not soiled his fingers with the " dirty 
acres" of Harry Bolingbroke; he would not have had 
to beat his head, like a canary bird, against the hard, 



TAKE WARNING. 



unpiteous stones of Pontefract Castle. Had the 
" Princely Buckingham" pondered o'er Margaret's 

" Beware of yonder dog ; 



Look, when he fawns, he bites ; and when he bites, 
His venom tooth will rankle to the death ; '' 

he would not, by playing at foot-ball with his own head, 
have had cause to say — 

" poor Margaret was a prophetess ! " 

And had Mary Stuart, the lovely, the adored, only 
listened to the " hey sirs! " of her attendants, and not 
crossed the border of " green Albyn," instead of losing 
her ' maiden head,' she would have been the head of 
three kingdoms ! 

And last, though not least, had that " proud bird of 
the mountain," the gallant and high minded Lochiel, 
not laughed to scorn the wizard's prophecy, his dwel- 
ling would not now have been lonely, nor he a wanderer 
from the land, where his fame still flourishes like the 
blue bells in her vallies! 

These are known, and authenticated instances, where 
warnings have been given, but like a dose of ipecacuana, 
not taken. But, besides these, and such like matters of 
history, there must have been many more eloquent 
forerunners of events and deaths, which "omnes illacry- 
mabiles," like the histories of certain preadamite Wel- 
lingtons, have not come down to us, through the want 
of an antediluvian Southey. Thus (selecting at random 

b2 



4 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

a couple of these suppositions) there is every reason 
to believe that the wife of the tragedian iEschylus 
often told her ' gude man' not to wander about without 
his hat; but a wilful man was just the same incorri- 
gible biped then as now; and the upshot, as all the 
world knows, was, that his pia mater was mistaken by 
a short sighted eagle for a stone, and he died, as his 
verdict has it, by a " determination of turtle soup to 
the brain."* And who doubts, though it is not recorded, 
that Lucretia was cautioned by her next door neigh- 
bour, on the evening previous to "her misfortune," not to 
open her doors to any one after it was dusk, as there 
were many ill-looking fellows about. 

And then does it require much stretching of the 
imaginative faculty to suppose that most, if not all, of 
those who in modern times have ended their lives by 
accident and ignominy, were not without their warn- 
ings? — the fond maternal dreadings of "do give it up 
my dear boy — come listen to your poor mother, before 
ill comes of it !" 

This life is a complete chapter of accidents ; and we 
are continually breaking our hearts, heads, necks and 
arms; — not to dwell on our unhappy predilection for 
walking into flooded brooks, and taking Prussic acid, 
for Epsom salts; — and yet it is not for want of warning 
that we perpetrate these foolish things; for if we be- 
lieve mankind (who, en passant, generally speaking, are 
apt to throw the hatchet), every catastrophe, from wilful 

* Alluding to the legend of that poet laureate's death, by an eagle 
letting fall a tortoise, or turtle, on his bald pate. — Credat Jud^us. 



TAKE WARNING. 

adultery down to a black eye, has its prophet; and 
some of note, like the first, two or three: — "Oh!" 
say these post mortem oracles, " we told him not to 
approach too near that river — that bull — that woman :" 
or, vice versa, as the case may be. Or, "had he taken 
our advice and staid over night, this would not have 
happened." Or, again, "we were continually telling 
him to beware of, &c." " Et iis simillimis." 

But besides these posthumous warnings, which, to 
say the best of them, are rather apocryphal, there are 
a thousand true ones, which are every moment rising 
up for our advantage — from every day life — from every 
day books — as beacons to light us from destruction. 
But have they that effect? Alas! no. In vain the 
labours of the moralist and the philosoper ! The annals 
of crime are as multifarious, as revolting as ever! Not 
a day passes but the blood of some vice-bound wretch 
waters the roots of the gaunt tree of ignominy ! Not 
a day but a new victim — perchance some blue-eyed 
thing — is offered at the insatiate maw of seduction ! 

Next to the predisposed determination not to take 
warning, is the ingenuity of some people to twist and 
pervert its application from themselves; and under the 
delusion, that by their age, rank, &c. they are exempt 
from the calamities of others, they view with polite 
contempt (for they are not superstitious) the pre- 
sentiments which daily are flashing phosphorent before 
their eyes; and then, like the reckless Rufus, leap into 
the vessel of fate, grandiloquently inquiring of those 
who yet would save them, " if they ever heard of a 



D HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

king's being drowned ? " In a word, so wilfully blind 
are the generality of mankind to their own danger, that, 
to borrow Sancho's lament, " if the sky was to rain 
warnings, not one, with their own admittance, would 
fit their heads;" — there is an idiosyncrasy about their 
cases — they are quite different. "To be sure, it was 
a very melancholy event that young man's death! — but 
then, those Smiths never live long; the father died 
young." Here a devil-me-care sort of fellow exclaims, 
" then, according to your ideas, the only surety of 
safety consists in being in continual dread; and because 
cases of hydrophobia, and coach accidents, sometimes 
occur, if a man keep a dog, he must consider himself 
bitten; if he mount a coach, he must consider himself 
thrown; and if he pass a bridge, he must consider him- 
self ducked." " Not exactly that, but I would have people 
be a little careful, and not quite fool-hardy." " Zounds 
sir! how you talk; — very fine in theory; — but if 
people were to be a little careful and not quite fool- 
hardy, trade would be ruined, positively at a stand still: 
for, know you not that the death of one man is the 
means of living to another? The misfortunes of A, 
the source of fortune to B ? So, if people were to 
follow your Utopian system, and believe in sermons 
and sudden deaths, there would be nothing but ' strikes' 
and stagnations in every profession, from the lord 
Speaker's in the Queen's high court of parliament, to the 
stone -breakers in the Queen's highway. As in the event 
of your notion coming into force — coroners would have 
to sit by themselves, instead of on others; undertakers 



TAKE WARNING. 7 

would be screwed down on board wages; while the 
doctors' calling would really be a sine cure; and grave- 
diggers, those knaves of spades! would be decidedly 
infra dig. Not to mention that flax dressers, hangmen, 
executors, and trustees, would have to tender their 
several resignations, like milord premier; and ulti- 
mately be let loose ('think of that Master Brooke!') 
on society ! " 

" Thank you sir, your advocacy in favour of fool- 
hardiness has amused, but not convinced me; though 
I must confess there is some truth in what you have 
asserted; — but I have yet to learn that mankind are 
happier with broken heads than whole bodies. This 
slowness of comprehension on my part may arise 
from my not belonging to one of the professions which 
you have particularised; and some old foolish notion, 
that keeping your distance from danger is not altogether 
the surest method of being knocked from now into 
next week. Be that, however, as it may, I myself am 
very exact in my approaches, and like, as they say, to 
have plenty of elbow room. Thus, for instance, I al- 
ways have the courtesy to give a dog the wall, par- 
ticularly if that dog be of evil fame and dishonest 
conversation; — I allow the like privilege to any other 
animal, biped, or quadruped, who has been convicted 
of rabies, on the deposition of two, or more, respectable 
witnesses. Nor am I disposed to be arbitrary on pre- 
cedency, when an escaped madman or a tiger is to be 
re-captured ; — on the contrary, I bear my disappoint- 
ment, as Acres says, ' like a Christian/ Again, I uni- 



HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

formly make it a rule to let twelve paces, and a 
couple of male elegants, intervene between me and 
a pretty woman; — for it is well, as Burns writes, to 

' Beware o' bonnie Ann ! ' 

And as to more vulgar dangers, I have ever kept from 
them — ' a pretty gentleman's distance ! ' " 

" Well sir, and what have you gained by your over 
cautiousness ? " 

" Why, not a great deal. But still, I have never, 
like some of my acquaintance, walked into a mill pond 
on purpose for twelve men to sit on me, at the ' Cat and 
Bottle.' Nor have I ever, by too close an intimacy 
with a bull-dog, given my friends the trouble (pleasure, 

1 should have said, for I have yet half a dozen silver 
spoons) of stifling me with a feather bed and bolster. 
Nor, lastly, have I ever let my brains out on a holiday, 
at the instigation of the first puppy who chose to 
quarrel with me. Indeed, on the whole, I may con- 
gratulate myself with having met with fewer moving 
accidents than most men; having never suffered any 
corporeal infliction but once; and that was when I 
was horse-whipped by mistake, on a market day, for 
having seduced a farmer's daughter; (this was very 
hard, it must be confessed, considering, I had never 
seen the lady in question;) but then, the father lasher 
afterwards begged my pardon; and what could I say ? " 



THE OLD YEAR— 1834. 



Mammy A — . " 'A made a finer end, and went away, an' it had 
been any christom child ; 'a parted even just between twelve and one, 
e'en at turning o' the tide." Lord B — . " They say, he cried out of 
Tories." Mammy A—. " Ay, that 'a did." Duke of W-. " And of 
Whigs." Mammy A—. " Nay, that 'a did not." Sir R. P-. " Yes, 
that 'a did; and said they were devils in place." Mammy A — . " 'A 
could neve abide plaice; 'twas a fish he never liked." Sir R. P — . " 'A 
said once, the devil would have him about Whigs." Mammy A — 
" 'A did in some sort, indeed, handle Whigs. But then he was a 
Radical ; and talked of the vote by Ballot. " — New Readings of Old 
Authors. 



The old year is dead, and the following we select 
from an evening paper fin nubibus!/: — 

" Lately died, at his residence Lower Sphere Street, 
aged fifty-two weeks, Eighteen Hundred and Thirty- 
four, Esquire, commonly called the year of our Lord. 
He was descended from a very ancient family — the 
Centuries; a branch of which came over to this 
country with the conqueror. He had latterly been 
growing more weekly; and from the early part of the 
day in question (Wednesday), until ten of the en- 
suing night, appeared to be suffering from the usual 



10 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

pangs common to one of his advanced age. But no 
great change occurred until twelve o'clock, when evi- 
dent symptoms of dissolution were visible; and that 
moment, attempting to raise his hand to beckon to an 
attendant minute, who had formerly been one of his 
seconds, he expired. 

" It is whispered in the higher circles that, in his 
last moments, he frequently mentioned the name of one 
' Louis Philippe.'* We cannot, however, vouch for the 
truth of this assertion, though we have it on undoubted 
authority to say, that a few days previous to his decease 
he transacted business at the Foreign Office, which fact 
seems to corroborate the former statement." 

The Gazette then proceeds to say, that " early on the 
following day, amidst the ringing of bells, his sun and 
air was publicly baptized at St. Januarias's, Chronology 
Square, by Archdeacon Frost, who officiated for Dr. Mer- 
ry weather, f who was prevented from attending by a cold. 
The Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel % stood 
sponsors, in room of Earl Grey and Lord Brougham, 
who were also prevented from being present by in- 
disposition, The young year, who it is rumoured, is 
already highly gifted, is, we believe, a ward in chancery." 
Then follow farther particulars of the deceased, and 
an analysis of his character, which appears to have 

* The liberticide King of the French, and royal target of a hundred 
assassins, was as notorious then, as since. 

t Dr. Merryweather, then, and still Dean of Hereford, but in 
the text, the name is used in an atmospheric sense. 

\ The New Annual 1835, commenced with Sir. Robert Peel's six 
weeks administration. 



THE OLD YEAR — 1834. 11 

been written with great candour and impartiality, the 
writer, entering more into detail than his late biographer, 
Francis Moore, Physician, who gives nothing but a 
few obscure extracts from his diary, which are very 
often imperfect, and sometimes unintelligible ; and, in 
the end, winds up his narrative by merely stating that, 
like Goldsmith's schoolmaster, he did over " terms 
and tides preside." 

For the amusement of our readers we give the sketch 
entire: — " In person he was generally allowed to be 
short, though some, on the contrary, assert he was very 
long. At any rate, it may be inferred, he was of a 
middle stature. His complexion was/«z>, and his air, 
which was very light, approached what is sometimes 
called frosty; but, in general, his manners were very 
mild and agreeable. Unlike some of his predecessors, 
he was not a Splendid Annual, for no Waterloo Mas- 
sacres, or Cloth of Gold Meetings, will be engraven on 
the tablets of his mausoleum. Neither was he a 
Religious Annual, though considerable pains were taken 
to make him one.* But he laughed at such endeavours, 
and made a burlesque song about them, which, we be- 
lieve, is still sung in the streets of London to the tune 
of the * King of the Cannibal Islands/ 

" Nor was he a Literary Annual; for of his literary 
taste much cannot be said, though some wise -acres 
talked of the intelligence and shine of certain northern 
lights. If there did such exist, they must evidently 

* Sir Andrew Agnew's " Agony bill " was debated, and thrown 
out in 1834. 



12 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

have been, like many other of his phenomena, invisible 
without a telescope! Indeed, his suffering Sotheby 
and Coleridge* to engage themselves as short-hand 
writers to Pluto's Evening Mail; and his transporting 
Sheridan Knowlesf beyond the seas, for only stealing 
a hint from the old poets, are facts not very creditable 
to his love of letters. 

" Yet, notwithstanding this, he was not altogether a 
fool, insomuch as he took in ' Crabbe's Poems' in 
numbers, and gave a lift to Leigh Hunt's little London 
venture: J — was taken, too, with the pictures of the 
' Pilgrims of the Rhine,' || and really admired the 
cleverness of ' Tilney Hall.' Nay, some went so far 
as to say, that he was seen cutting the leaves of the 
' Last Days of PompeiiV§ but that we think was be- 
yond him, never having heard that he was much of a 
classic. One thing, however, to his advantage, must 
not be omitted, — he discontinued that contemptible 
monotony " The Doit Magazines." 

* Sotheby, the eloquent translator of Homer, and Coleridere died 
in 1834. 

t Sheridan Knowles, a name worthy to be classed with the dramatic 
poets of any age, or any clime, owing to the unpardonable neglect of 
his countrymen, was obliged this year to leave his native shores, 
and seek a living among strangers in America — " Ingrata Patria ! 
ne ossa quidem mea habes." 

X Crabbe's Poems and Leigh Hunt's " London Journal," excited 
a good deal of interest during 1834. 

|| Bulwer's illustrated " Pilgrims of the Rhine," and Hood's 
" Tylney Hall," a very piquant novel, were published in 1834. 

§ The " Last Days of Pompeii," though advertised, did not appear 
till 1835. 



THE OLD YEAR 1834. 13 

Nor yet, in addition to the above exceptions, could 
he be called a Sporting Annual ; for though, in imitation 
of his betters, he kept an Eclipse or two'; and in the 
earlier part of his life had to do with Spring, otherwise 
called Winter* he seldom took a very strong Epsom 
purge, or handled his fowling piece, save occasionally, 
when he bagged an " Irish Landlord." But then, if 
he did not hunt or race himself, not being, like some 
of his family, a leaper, he allowed, without molestation, 
others to follow their own gait (gate) ; and par conse- 
quence, livings, fees, patients, places, plums, dinners, 
names, and husbands, were as hotly pursued over hedge 
and ditch, by parsons, lawyers, doctors, courtiers, mer- 
chants, poets, patriots and coquettes, under his regime, 
as ever they were in the times of his forefathers, though 
many, as experience has shewn, were thrown out in 
the chase ! 

And lastly, neither was he that risible wild fool 
which laughs from year to year, — a Comic Annual. 
Notwithstanding, it must be confessed, he had a turn 
that way, as the caricatures in the Burlington and 
Lowther " Arcades (ambo!) " witness. 

" Then, if he were neither of all these, in God's name, 
what was he? " — " Guess." " Humph! — An immoral 
year?" " Pretty ! — but no, he was nearly as moral as 
his progenitors, and, for ought we know, more so. Trv 
again, most accomplished Lector." " Then I suppose 
you mean to insinuate that he was a rara avis, — in 

* The prize-fighter, Tom Spring's real designation is well known 
to be Winter. 



14 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

short, an Uncommon Annual ? " " Not exactly, seeing 
that in his reign, or rain, just as ever they did, the 
ordinary folk ate, drank, slept, loved, fought, and 
played at whist, and died; while their more versatile 
and refined prototypes, the extraordinary folk, in their 
alternative moods of beseeching, affirming, bewailing, 
confessing and threatening; rehearsed with the usual 
eclat, their fly not yettings, their 'pon my honour it 
is true! — their who would have thought it? — their 
I have seen my bride another's, — their owning the soft 
impeachment; and in case of quarrel, their keeping 
their gentlemanly distances. And over and above to 
the foregoing, Cat's Meat and ' Oysters Sir, ' were 
vended and devoured in the streets, pretty much on 
the same system as in 1833. The usual bits of stock 
classicality, — ' Arcades Ambo' — ' Rusticus expectat,' 
&c. &c, were sported at St. Stephen's in town, and 
vice versa the ditto bits of stock patriotism, — ' A bold 
peasantry, &c.' — * The flag that braved,' &c. &c. in the 
shire guilds in the country. 

" Nor were the accouchemens of mountains, the 
dissecting of gadflies, the breaking of butter synonyms 
on wheels, and the blowing of bladders, of less rare 
occurrence than they used to be. 

" Not to mention that establishments were equally 
broken up and broken into — parsons tendered their 
resignation, not of their cures, but of their probity — 
and prices were set upon men's heads, and their tales, 
and accepted; and upon kine, and refused. Moreover 
many persons, like parliaments, without a cause, were 



THE OLD YEAR — 1834. 15 

pro-rogued; many, like Higgins and his Double 
Glo'ster, toasted !* and many clap-clawed one another 
in public, who, when in private, amicably smoked a pipe 
together, like Signor Nicolini and the Lion, in that old 
book the Spectator. 

" In short, all the bother, blarney, and bletherum 
skite that was tolerated in 1833 — 2 — 1, was equally so 
in 1834, even to that last rag of superstition, which 
future ages will laugh at us in their sleeves for retain- 
ing, viz. Corporations! And, in a word, most sapient, 
you must have another shy before you can bring down 
the popinjay." — " Pshaw!" — " Well dont be savage, 
and you shall hear what he was." — " Pish! I don't 
desire to hear any thing about such a humdrum con- 
cern. For his 

News and reviews, Sir, I've read through and through Sir, 

With little admiring or blaming 
* His ' papers are barren of home news or foreign — 

No murders or ' cheats ' worth the naming. 

[Exit, in a huff 

" La! you now, how you fly out, (looking after him) 
an insolent, prejudiced, low-minded — yet for all he 
can say, the dear old bissextile was a more respectable 
character, and a better christian to boot, than three - 
tenths of his predecessors, with all their thunder and 
lightning tunics! insomuch as he renounced many 
family enormities, such as bustles, burkings, swingings, 

* Alluding to the well known familiarity which existed between 
the late Duke of Gloucester and Col. Higgins, his master of the 
horse, or something of the sort. 



16 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

mad dogs, &c. &c. Besides, he cut off as much as he 
could afford of the entail of cholera and riots, left him 
by his father, and was the cause too of* the apprehen- 
sion of that notorious cut-purse ' Robert the Devil/* 
who nightly infested the metropolitan theatres. But 
for that old numskull to insinuate that he was deficient 
in gallantry! — sheer envy, we assure you madam; for, 
to our certain knowledge, he was no tyro that way ; 
always making allowances for the dampness of our 
island. 

" And again, as to the other matter of murders, 
he was certainly very cautious, and, like his cousin 
Brougham, was afraid of ' doing too much/ and his 
hands, like those of that distinguished personage, 
would have ' been clean/ f at least, he would not have 
committed any thing worth the naming, had it not 
been for some rascal reviewers, who plainly told him he 
was a nincompoop, and a disgrace to his family — ' he a 
year indeed V Many of his name, before they had 
arrived at half his months, had extinguished, secundum 
artem, a ' Weare/ or a ' Maria Martin ! ' And they 
ended by threatening to erase his name from the ar- 
chives of his line, if he did not instanter cut some 
one's throat, or send an ounce of blue plum into some 
one's pudding. 



* " Robert the Devil," a piece of diabolical nonsense, mucb in fa- 
vour in 1833 and 1832 with the play-going public, hut since judi- 
ciously expelled the boards. 

t " My hands are clean ! " Vide Lord Brougham's speech to his 
countrymen of that period. 



THE OLD YEAR — 1834. 17 

"At first 1834 only laughed at them, and in high 
glee blew the following on his stop note — 

" To daunton me — to daunton me — 

O ken ye what it is that 'd daunton me ? 
There's the Tailor's strike,* and the ' Penny Magazine ! !' 

And a' that I hae borne sin' syne — 
There's whigs and whigmaleerie — 
I think it will be muckle for to daunton me ! " 

" But to ' prevent misunderstanding,' as Acres says, 
in the end he perpetrated the Pentonville concern,! 
and added Earl Spencer and the Duke of Gloucester,]: 
by way of natural 'rider.' 

" And now a word about his politics: — Of his Whig 
sayings, and Tory doings, much, as Sir Roger would 
say, may be said on both sides; though the least said, 
perhaps, the better, in so much, as neither the sayings 
of the former, nor the doings of the latter, were al- 
ways intelligible ! And then, are they not written in 
the 'Morning Chronicle?* Some of them, however, 
are worth noting down; more, though, as political ano- 
malies — and like Homer's Catalogue of schooners, to 
swell the history of our annuitant — than any thing else; 
and as such, after the manner of Virgil's introduction 
of his ' Glaucumque, Medontaque, Thersilochumque,' 

* A strike, or turning out for increase of wages, took place among 
the tailors, in the autumn of 1834. 

t The murder at Pentonville, whose horrors there is no occasion 
further to recur to. 

X The Duke of Gloucester and Earl Spencer were among the dis- 
tinguished departures of this year. 



18 HUMOUR AND PATHOS* 

without comment, to excite risibility, we introduce 
them here. 

" The following, unarranged, are a few of the most 
remarkable and grin-worthy : — Earl Grey's last appear- 
ance in the character of Adam* — ' Must I then leave 
the Paradise ! ' — the sweeping clause of the ■ fain would 
I climb' boys ;f — the bastard law, or the society for 
promoting christian depravity; — the King's calling in 
the new police to turn out the Melbourne administra- 
tion: % — the Duke of Wellington making himself * a very 
young hero' at Oxford ;|| — ditto, his assumption of the 
dictatorship^ and his 'disfigurement' for six weeks, 
like Master Burke, of all the characters in the farce of 
the ' Cabinet; — iterumque ditto, the rumour that he 
was about to commence business in the whig line, and 
ditto, ditto, ditto, his subsequent denial of it, in what, 
by some immensely clever fellow, was called ' His High- 
ness's Manifesto !* * * * * 

Having said so much of the hero of our 
sketch, little now remains for us to say, save that, on 
the whole, he was a jolly old annus, who loved his 



* Earl Grey's retirement from ministerial affairs happened in this 
year. 

f The passing of the legislative enactment to prevent the sweeps 
from crying their profession — O tempora ! O legislators ! 

X The sudden dismissal of the Melbourne administration. 

|| The Duke of Wellington's inauguration as Chancellor of the 
University of Oxford. 

§ Alluding to his holding the several offices of legislature, during 
Sir R. Peel's sojourn on the continent. 



THE OLD YEAR 1834. 19 

glass, his song, and his Glasgow rubber;* and, more- 
over, that he was ' nae fae to wine and mutton / but 
often treated his friends in public, as Lords Grey and 
Durham f can testify. To be sure, his denying the 
little sweeps the use of their loqual organs, was rather 
arbitrary; and his burning the two houses of Parliament 
rather naughty. But then he was 'rheumatic/ and 
was latterly troubled with a ' whoreson cold/ caught by 
the tailor's strike; or, as some said, by his opening his 
mouth so often, to cry ' hear! hear'/ to the whigs. 
Be that as it may, he is gone ! — Therefore let his errors 
go with him. Others may revile his memory. We, 
at least, grateful for some happy hours he gave us, will 
not disturb his manes. No ! in the spirit of departed 
genius, J ' it shall never be said that 1 834 was in want 
of a good word, when we, his friend, had one to give 
give him.' So, old year — 

" Fare-thee well ! and if for ever — 
Still for ever, fare — thee — well ! " 



* The Glasgow lottery was drawn in 1834. 
t The public dinners given to those noblemen. 
$ Sheridan. 



THE ILL-USED WIFE. 

(a sketch.) 



" Oh no ! she blam'd him never ! " — Haynes Bayley. 

******* 
* * * * * * * 

" She never so much as gave him an 

angry look, much less a word ! " said the Sexton, 
" though he used her like a brute — and brute is too 
good a word for the like o' him. Often would he turn 
her out of doors o' nights when you wou'd not chide 
a stranger dog from your roof leave alone a fellow 
creature ; — and then she wou'd come, poor thing ! to 
one of the neighbours, and softly tap and ask to be let 
in, and when they, as it is nat'ral, wou'd enquire what 
ailed her? she wou'd attempt to laugh it off, and, 
God forgive her ! wou'd tell a hundred little stories, 
but never a word that he had ill-treated her and turned 
her out o' doors;" "Ah!" continued the Sexton, 
" she had a bitter time with him ! — but there, she's 
gone, poor thing !" And the old man sighed, and see- 



THE ILL-USED WIFE. 21 

ing I was silent, took up his spade to depart, but pre- 
sently he returned again, bearing a root of white 
violets with him which he planted in silence on the 
new made grave. 

There was something so feeling yet so natural in 
this little offering — it was " sweets to the sweet" — 
that I could not refrain from shedding a tear which, 
meandering slowly down my cheek-bone, fell on the 
violet root as if to water it ! At this the old man 
looked up and smiled — but said nothing — but con- 
tinued pressing the mould round about the root, and 
gently picked the bits of dirt out of the blossoms. My 
heart was full — so when he had finished, I shook his 
hand — it was a hard one and somewhat dirty — but no 
matter — I would not at that moment have changed it 
for the jewelled fingers of a monarch — for the small 
reason that the heart that owned it was worth twenty 
of such purple mockeries ! * * * 



The story of Fanny L is not an uncommon one 

— It has been told by a hundred pens before mine — 
and Wordsworth has narrated her fate in one simple 
line,"— 

" The gentle lady married to the Moor ! " 

But to give it — When quite a girl, Fanny had, against 
the wishes of her parents, loved and married one of 
those heartless, handsome beings, who wear the flower 



22 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

of beauty in their bosoms, more for show than for 
affection ; and who, when its fragrance no longer con- 
duces to their vanity — to make them the " observ'd of 
all observers," — cast it forth to perish, or, crueller still ! 
tear its lovely leaves, one by one, away. 

In vain, previous to her marriage with him, had her 
friends cautioned her to beware, and not in the bril- 
liancy of the serpent forget its sting ! Their care was 
of no avail, — she loved him — and when did love — 
female love — ever listen to advice ? 

For a little while, as long as her parents lived, through 
pure fear of their resentment, (for a woman's tyrant is 
ever cowardly !) he treated her with some degree of 
kindness. But when they died, which they did shortly 
afterwards — one following in a brief time the other, and 
both of a broken heart, it was different. For hardly had 
the grass and little daisy grown o'er the bones of the old 
people, when he threw off the mask, and appeared in 
his real colours — a cold, cruel barbarian — the blushless 
companion of every vice, without the common decency 
— the hypocrite's virtue — of cloaking the wrongs he was 
hourly doing her. But such was the mild nature of 
the heart he was breaking and turning very bitter — 
that although he made no secret of his infidelities, and 
spent the whole of his time in the company of the 
worst and lost of both sexes — leaving her wretched and 
alone — -often with little save her tears — she never 
murmured — but when she heard his midnight knock 
at the door, would run as usual, all softness, and let 
him in, crying " Dear Henry !" But in return, con- 



THE ILL-USED WIFE. 23 

scious that he did not deserve such sweetness he would 
morosely tell her to begone, and push her from him ; 
indeed, on one or two occasions he struck her ! — yet 
still, mild, blue-eyed thing, she never said him, nay ; or 
once spake to him, otherwise than in kindness. 

But this conduct could not last long — Woman is a 
string of music, framed alone for kindness to serenade 
upon ; and when played by any other it discourses for 
a while a few melancholy notes and then snaps asun- 
der ! 

It was so with Fanny ; one night, in a drunken fit, 
her tyrant so far forgot his manhood as to kick her. 
This operating with grief and other causes, for she was 
near her confinement, ultimately laid her in the tomb ! 
Such barbarous usage as this might, one would have 
supposed, have estranged the most attached bosom — 
but it was not so — she still remained to him, though 
she was dying, the soft thing she had ever been ; and 
upon the doctor's enquiring about the bruise, which 
his brutality had left marked on her sweet body, she 
said she had had a fall, and invented a thousand little 
circumstances, on purpose, to screen him. 

But how did he repay this devoted creature's attach- 
ment ? Oh God ! while she was lying in agony for his 
crimes, he wrote a letter to an abandoned girl with whom 
he had long associated, promising to marry her as soon as 
his wife was gone to " kingdom come ! " (his own 
words). This epistle by some means fell into other 
hands, and was heartlessly inclosed to the poor suf- 
ferer. On receiving it she said nothing — but just 



24 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

before her death she called her husband to her bedside, 
and regarding him with a seraph smile of forgiveness, 
put it into his hand, and exclaiming " Henry — dear 
Henry ! " — expired. 



KEEP YOUR DISTANCE. 



" By my valour, then, Sir Lucius, forty yards is a good distance. 
Odds, levels, and aims ! I say it is a good distance— a pretty Gentle- 
man's distance." — " Rivals." 

" If a man make you keep your distance, the comfort is, he keeps 
his at the same time." — Swift's " Hospital of Incurables." 



When heated with wine, you make a rush towards 
your companion to avenge some imaginary insult — put- 
ting himself in a '• Verba dandi " sort of attitude, and 
squaring his booms — he coolly, without asking the 
Irish query of " what is your raisonfor that there same," 
— tells you to " keep your distance ! " 

Again, when tempted by " golden glorious oppor- 
tunity," and a very pretty mouth, to snatch a kiss — 
the maiden in question, seizing the first weapon at 
hand, (perhaps a spit !) warns you, with a little scornful 
mow " a V Esmeralda" " to keep your distance, Sir ! " 

Or, should you, when in town, meet, in the " sweet 
shady side of Pall-Mali," the member of your native 
borough, to whom, at the last election, you gave a 
" plumper," and otherwise exercised your interest for — 

c 



26 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

he, without noticing your un-woodstocked hand, and 
evidently wishing, as the Scots say, for " byganes to be 
byganes," gives you an awful bend, which, when inter- 
preted, means, " Keep your distance, fellow !" 

Or, should you, too, when on a fishing excursion, 
have done your " spiriting gently," and find the water 
of the river (though very good for ducks) " vilissima 
rerum ;" — to obviate this, and to replenish your twig- 
gen bottle, should you, I say, on your passage to the 
nearest farm-house, meet the " dog in office," — un- 
casing his box of ivories, he enunciates a growl, — 
which says, as plainly as a growl can, " you'll keep your 
distance, if you are wise, my fine fellow ! " 

Reader ! have you an idol ? — is she pretty ? — blue 
eyes — die away looks — " we met, 'twas in a crowd " — 
and all that, — the general essentials of an idol — if you 
have — beware ! approaches are dangerous — and there 
is not a more sacrilegious iconoclast than familiarity ! 
— unapotheosising, and counter deifications, being its 
vocation. Therefore, if you wish your idol to re- 
main such, " Keep your distance ! " For think you, 
as that wild young Spaniard, Juan, says : — 



If Laura had been Petrarch's wife, 

He would have written sonnets all his life? 



Decidedly not. For who could indite sonnets to a 
woman whom he saw every morning in her night -cap 
(of white dimity), and every day at dinner swallowing 
slices of cow beef with the gravy in it ? 



KEEP YOUR DISTANCE. 27 

But, perhaps, your days of idolatry and treacle water 
are over ; and you sacrifice at the shrine of some lite- 
rary, political, or military " Sir Oracle." The author 
of , for instance. Mr. Secretary this, or Com- 
mander-in-Chief that. In a word, you admire one, or 
all of them, and, of course, would not have your wor- 
ship desecrated. Then, — Keep your distance ! For, 
on a nearer approach, great men always either exceed 
or fall short of the idea you had previously entertained, 
when, only seeing them through the highly telescopic 
medium of popular report. In other words, they will 
either by their more than expected resplendency, burn 
you to ashes, like Zeus, in his militia uniform, did 
Semele, or knock your respect from now into next 
week, by their apparent insignificance. Both catas- 
trophes are lamentable. The one destroys entirely 
your critical acumen; while the other makes you 
curse yourself for a " very shallow monster," in having 
mistaken for a " Lion," a fellow, who turns out to be 
only an ass, in the chancelloric wig — martial whis- 
kers — and epic growl of the royal forester ! 

Such are the two lights which great men, when they 
come in too close a contact with their fellow beings, 
must needs be seen in ; for the great origin of all the 
nobler passions, — love, glory, veneration, is imagina- 
tion, and imagination can only be retained by keeping 
your distance from the object of that love, glory, or 
veneration. In doing that, you have your goddess, 
your hero; be pig-headed, and rush into their pre- 
sence, and your goddess becomes a woman, and a very 
c 2 



28 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

ordinary one too ! and your hero is no longer " Pyra- 
mus," but " Bottom the Weaver !" 

Think not, that only modern heroes, and ditto god- 
desses, are here alluded to — no ! For what has given 
the Achilleses and Helens of history their renown ? 
Why, simply, their distance from us. Once be pre- 
sented to them, and our enthusiasm would vanish, 
particularly when we found that Major Achilles could 
not write his name, and Madam Helen was not over 
and above " spicy " in her mots d 'usage. 

But to return once more to you, gentle reader, 
Peradventure, after all, you are neither an idolater, or 
lion hunter \ but, simply, one of those scientific men, 
who, with the rabble of half the alphabet attached to 
the heels of their name, would be puddling in the stars 
— poking in the moon — raking out the ashes of the 
sun — dabbling in the bottom of the sea, like a flounder, 
and boring the earth through with a nail passer, that 
they may make a fizgig of it, and then, with a brother 
philosopher, each placed at a different pole, spin it, 
a la George the Fourth, for their amusement ! 

If you are, I repeat, one of these modern Archi- 
medes.es, and not too far gone — i.e. if no symptoms of 
rabies have followed the philosophic bite — from the 
practical part of such theories, I emphatically caution 
you, to keep your distance, lest you come to the very 
extremely comfortable conclusion of the Dane, that all 
is " flat, stale, and unprofitable!" — the moon — the 
sun — the stars — and the green earth, not excepted. 
And here, let me ask, " what good can it do man- 



KEEP YOUR DISTANCE. 29 

kind to know, that what they had been taught to con- 
sider perfection, is not perfect ? and that every drop of 
water that descends their throats, contains myriads of 
animalculse. Why, the first discovery only tends to 
make them discontented — while the second, in self de- 
fence, uniformly drives them to the use of " ginnums," 
as Hook calls it, for the rest of their lives. 



WALES AND THE WELSH. 



" Thou once mountain nation of valour and power — 
Low lies thy beacon — thy castle, high tower. 
The pole-cat, dark adder, th' unclean bird, and beast, 
Possess the ruined mansion where chiefs held the feast" 

Jeffrey Llewelyn Prichard. 

Wales is the land of association ! — noble deeds and 
noble songs are her inheritance — and every clod of her 
Cymru is rife with a tale — a bold and glorious tale of 
other days ! Ascend unto her mountains, and you 
may count a castle on every side ; descend into her 
valleys, and every step you take you tread upon a 
Patriot's grave ! While every field that meets your 
eye, is a " Marathon," where homes and hearths have 
been contended for — and where men have done, and 
died ! 

And then, her mountains ! — nature's bulwarks ! 
awful in their freedom ! seated round her land, like 
Indians about a watch fire. How fraught with the 
legendary past ! How wound up in her history ! — at 
once the refuge and the battle cry of her sons — and 
the worshipped point, to which the dying Cambrian 



WALES AND THE WELSH. 31 

turned his last look, as he blessed dear Wales ! Who, 
that treads their steps, feels not their influence ? and 
who, feeling their influence, does not wish himself a 
Welshman ? And what Welshman approaches their 
recesses, without taking the shoes from off his feet in 
patriotism, — in reverence ! For it was in their Pene- 
tralia — 

" the bards of old — the glorious throng ! 

They of the mountain, and the battle song.*" 

met in council — chanted the glories of their chiefs, 
and with notes of power, invoked Liberty —their 
Native Liberty, to come forth, and aid her countrymen : 
then, answered to the generous call, the loud shout of 
the assembled heroes, as pledging the " Hirlas," each 
vowed to return as victor, or return no more ! — 
in a word, to do, or die ! 

It was there, too, the white-footed maids of Brute, 
with flying locks and heaving bosoms, watched for the 
return of their affianced brave ones, — brave ones, 
whose heroic darings had already given themes to the 
" Telyn."f It was there, also, when the refusal to 
yield was declared pride by the Saxon Envoy, that the 
harp poured its spontaneous flow in defence, — " yes, 
we are & proud people. We are proud of our moun- 
tains — and we are proud of our mountain maids — and 
the deeds of our fathers are ever heard in our 
' Cymru ' with awe and with thrill ! " 

* Mrs. Hemans. 

f The " Telyn," — the Cambrian harp, in distinction to the 
u Crwth," or small portable harp. 



32 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

And, lastly, when all was over, — it was there, (to the 
mountains,) the bard, indignant, fled the gory spec- 
tacle of his country's ruin ; and, seated on the highest 
summit, vented, with a wild gesticulation, to his Crwth, 
or harp, " Cambria s Curse " on the invaders, as they 
passed below, and then, with the high resolve of one 
who was determined to die nobly, if he could not live 
so, plunged headlong — 

" To join the dim choir of the hards who have been, 
With Lewarch, and Meilor, and Merlin the old, 
And sage Taliessin : " 

Again, view Wales apart from her historic recollec- 
tions, — her days of deed and glory ; — take her as a 
landscape, and lo ! is she not beautiful ? — her sunny 
vales — her bays vying with that of Napoli ! — her sud- 
den bursts of scenery, which startle and way -lay — her 
witchery of foliage — her streams, slim and fairy, show- 
ing their silvery feet every where ! — and her mountains, 
already named, on whose tops, Switzer and Scott, might 
deem themselves at home, and talk of Tell, and " Wal- 
lace Wight," without disparagement ! 

Such is the land of Glendower and Owen Tudor ! 
And her brave, generous, and high-minded people are 
every inch worthy of it ! For exalted by the use of 
their metaphorical and pure language ; made up, as it 
is, of lofty periods and noble sentiments ; — and their 
minds full of emulation, and sublimed by the recollec- 
tion of the deeds of their ancestry, which are to this 
day, spoken of among the peasantry — the Welsh, 



WALES AND THE WELSH. 33 

morally rise far above their neighbours, and, in their 
national character, partake much of the heroism and 
self-devotion of old Rome. For, like Fabricius, and 
that man, 

" awful from the plough ! — 

it has ever been their practice to act justly — their emu- 
lation to perform nobly ! 

And it was this deifying trait in their disposition, of 
old, that made the female patriot Boadicea, quaff the 
poisoned bowl, and leave all — for honour ! 

It was this, too, that caused the self-devoted Gam 
to ward off with his generous breast the death intended 
for his sovereign, and, smiling, sink a mountain 
Spartan ! 

And it was the consciousness of possessing this that 
made Tudor Vaughan, the self-created knight, regard- 
less of Edward and his prerogative, assume the badge 
of chivalry, which he so well deserved to wear. 

Yet, notwithstanding this nobility of nature, the 
countrymen of St. David, are a plain, simple people ; 
and, to a stranger's eye, often appear dull and repulsive, 
and incapable of much feeling, or enthusiasm. But 
there lies the beauty and primitive freshness of their 
national character ! Let, however, some popular 
movement appear, which would call forth their sym- 
pathies, and appeal to their love of patriotism, and 
then see, whether they would not be enthusiastic ! — 
then see, whether they would not feel ! In a word, let 

B 3 



34 



HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 



but the crusade of Liberty be preached upon their 
hills, and the " Sevi-lan~gwy,"* old Cambria's emblem, 
now thought unworthy to be twined with the Rose, 
Shamrock, and Thistle, will bloom prouder than all ! 

* The " Sevi-lan-gwy," (pronounced " Sevee-lan-goo-ee) or wild 
leak of Wales, was the original national emblem, and not the rank 
garden leak, as now generally borne. 



THE HARD STEAK. 



Now good digestion wait on appetite ! " — Macbeth. 



As the waiter left the room, I lifted the cover— good 
God! it was the hardest steak I ever attempted to 
gorge; I could make nothing of it; Dando, sharpset 
as he was, and who knew, as well as most, what it was 
to want half a dozen plates of beef, would inevitably 
have left its discussion, with a sigh, out in his daily 
dispatches; and I doubt whether the '* rump-fed 
ronyon " wife of the " Master o' the Tiger," in Mac- 
beth, would not as inevitably, after two or three futile 
attempts to pouch it, have trundled it over the hatches 
of her husband's schooner, to victual the secular appe- 
tite of the nearest shark. 

In a word, to bolt it, would have cowed the dental 
jurisprudence of a beef-eater; — even Brinsley Sheri- 
dan's ! * — for it was the very hypothesis of toughness : 

* Vide, the « Critic." 



36 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

the file in iEsop's fables, must have been a marrow- 
pudding for softness to it. And I strongly believe, if 
a jury of gluttons had been impanelled on the spot, 
they would have declared Medea's soup a la Reine of 
old Eson hache, and Saturn's family hors d'oeuvres, to be 
tender, when compared to it: * — nor, in so doing, would 
they have forfeited their judicial oath, as I conscien- 
ciously suspect, either, or both, would have responded 
less " noli me tangere" to the palate. 

In vain, I essayed the usual and most approved me- 
thods to cut, sever, divide — nay, even to hack it. I 
could not make the least impression on it; it was as 
tenacious of the " cut direct " as a country cousin, met 
obvious, on the " sweet shady side of Pall Mall," or at 
the bottom of " Constitution Hill." The well tem- 
pered cutlery of my host was at fault; — in vain my 
assiduity to part it; it proclaimed "war to the knife " 
and the latter, very unusual, only came off second best. 
I might as well have undertaken to carve the Balaam 
box of the " John Bull " in Fleet Street. " All flesh 
is grass \" saith the Scripture; but this, I apprehend, 
when in the bills of mortality, amidst the " lowing 
herd," must have graduated upon flint; or, at the least, 
Portland stone. 

Panting with my dissecting labours, I turned it over 
on my plate; it was an ill-looking piece of cross-grained 
meat, done with the gravy in it, (as they say), of a 

* Alluding to " Miss Medea's " attempt, to regenerate her father- 
in-law, by cutting him in collops and stewing him — and the father of 
the Gods ' lapideous diet.' 



THE HARD STEAK. 37 

brownish tincture, picked out with orange fat, very 
much resembling in appearance the piece of flesh de- 
pictured in the tyke's mouth in the spelling book, and 
measured from the tip of the tail (for it had a sort of 
caudatorij appendage,) to the snout (the other land's-end 
of it,) about four inches, by two. 

Again and again, I attempted to cut it; but malgre, 
my endeavours, it still retained an imperturbable ap- 
pearance of contumacy; — a sort of Barbara Allen 
obduracy. 

At length, by dint of repeated hackings on its inte- 
grity, my efforts were crowned with a partial success ; 
and I succeeded in braiding from the main division, 
about a square inch. Joyously, with the puissance of 
a conqueror, who has gained his " little go " at Water- 
loo, or elsewhere, did I place that parted morsel in my 
mouth. But to masticate it! — there was the rub: for 
though it set my teeth on an edge, they were not sharp 
enough to overcome its more than overseer insensi- 
bility: — no, there was an incorrigible durity about it, 
which defied my grinders; and as it slushed up and 
down in my mouth, like Indian rubber, it seemed to 
intimate " give us none of jour jaw — I am no chew 
chew matter/' 

I threw down my knife and fork in despair ; mentally 
assured, as the sweat ran down my cheeks, the beast 
that owned this steak was no common beast — no every 
day nowt; which after it has been roasted, baked, 
broiled, boiled, and fried, under the multifarious de- 
signations of hung-beef, cow-beef, bull-beef, ox beef, 



38 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

and chicken-beef, is heard of no more. No! it doubt- 
less was a descendant of one of Cacus's backward urged 
oxen — the pushing kine of Scripture — the dun cow — 
Tom Thumb's " milky mother" — or the colly with the 
" crumplety horn." 

But, even were its pedigree thus established, how 
often it must have run about, its tail stiff, aloft in the 
clouds. How often it must have been advertised in 
the papers, as " stolen, or strayed." Not to mention, 
how often it must have exhibited the Horatian " fcenum 
in cornu," and topped the fences in pursuit of some 
elderly gentleman, with an umbrella and scarlet upper 
benjamin, before its flesh could have arrived at such a 
Vardarelli state of hardihood! Then, again, how many 
urchins must have ridden, suspended at its tail ; — how 
many, the very " butcher of a silk doublet," it must have 
gored; — how many china shops it must have unadvisedly 
entered; — how many Bullum versus Boatum scenes it 
must have been an actor in; — how many brains it 
must have let out for a half-holiday; — how many 
" runs upon the bank," as Hood says, it must have 
caused ! 

My imagination pictured all these preparatory train- 
ings of its toughness; and, once more, with the despe- 
ration of a man who is about to do, or die, or as Pope 
hath it, u greatly, daring dine." I attempted to de- 
vour the " cattle piece" before me; — munch, munch, 
munch. At last, completely out of patience with its 
contumacity, I pushed the dish from me. " The devil 
take it!" cried I. " So, I will;" replied a voice at my 



THE HARD STEAK. 39 

elbow. I looked round, and espied a dapper, grinning 
little man in black, busily masticating my dinner. 
" Nothing like a beef steak for sea-sickness/' said he, 
nodding familiarly to me, and he laughed: " no matter 
whether home bred, or 'neat as imported;'" and he 
laughed louder than ever. " There ! " cried he, " I 
have pouched it;" and again the roof shook with his 
discordant laughter. 

A feeling of awe began to creep over me, as I re- 
garded the movements of my unknown intruder; which 
appeared to afford him great pleasure, as chuckle after 
chuckle testified. Presently he came up to me, and, 
with a malicious twist of his ugly countenance, inquired 
" if I were a judge of bulls ? — I dont mean Irish bulls, 
or pope's bulls," said the wretch ; and again my ears 
were grated with that horrid laugh. — " But bond fide 
bulls." " But, come," continued he, "I will show you 
a fine specimen — a very fine specimen indeed;" and, 
opening the door of the coffee-room, he admitted the 
hugest black bull I ever saw. I rose from my seat in 
evident alarm. " Come, dont be alarmed," exclaimed 
my tormentor, " he won't touch you — as gentle as a 
dove — a lady might ride on him;" and he laughed, as 
he patted the sides of the immense animal, which ap- 
peared a very Margaret Professor of vice and fierceness. 
The bull had now approached within a yard of me ; 
when, all of a sudden, it began to bellow hideously, 
lashing its tail, and pawing the floor with its feet. 
" 'Ware bull!" cried the little man in black, breaking 
forth in his abominable laugh. I sprang out of an 



40 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

opposite window, closely followed by the infuriated 
monster; onward we went! "up Fish Street, down 
St. Magnus corner!" It was surprising to see how 
polite people were in giving place to us; — off went a 
commissioner of police's hat; — down on his marrow 
bones, in the most abject homage, went a portly alder- 
man of Bishopsgate without. Even the very cabmen 
civilly turned their vehicles aside to let us pass — 

" A brace of draymen bid— God speed ' us well,' 
And had the tribute of his subtle knee," 

inclusive of his horns, and were instantly knocked into 
the kennel. His hackle was now raised, and numerous 
were the pedestrians that were every minute ' raising 
five hands high,' and performing ' pas seuls' in the air. — 
" Two pieces of still life," (mutes, at a door in Water- 
loo Place,) were regularly nailed down: — while he drew 
off a Magdalen, in his best manner, and made her eva- 
cuate her flag station in Regent Street. 

Onward, onward, we flew, like a musket bullet and 
a cannon's ball! — the pursued and the pursuer. The 
sweat fell from me in large drops; and my terrible 
adversary was gaining ground on me every moment; 
for, every now and then, the frothy foam from his 
mouth scattered itself in immense flakes over my 
head and shoulders, scalding my panting flesh like vi- 
triol! — Another moment, and his cruel horns would 
be lacerating my body. Agonised with terror, I made 
a dash into a shop; — a loud crash succeeded, inter- 
mingled with an exclamation of " oh cry!" — I opened 



THE HARD STEAK. 41 

my eyes, (for I had been all this while asleep), and 
found myself still in the coffee-room; and that I had 
just, in my dreaming fears, upset my dinner table, and 
the waiter, who was at that instant entering with a 
glass of brandy grog, without sugar. " Waiter!" said 
a grave elderly gentlemen, " this is very unpardonable 
negligence on your part — come, I have been waiting 
for my brandy and water this ten minutes." — " Coming 
sir," cried the drawer; and the next moment he did 
come, with something short for the grave elderly gentle- 
man, and something devilish long for me, in the shape 
of a bill for the destruction of sundry plates, rummers, 
and dishes " of sorts." 



THE MISANTHROPE. 



" Have I not had to wrestle with my lot? 
Have I not smTer'd things to be forgiven ? 
Have I not had my brain sear' J, my heart riven ? 
Hopes sapp'd, name blighted, life's life lied away ; 
And only not to desperation driven, 
Because not altogether of such clay, 
As rots into the souls of those whom I survey ! " 

Childe Harold. 

* * * * * He was a being of strange 
temperature — wayward and fretful, and his gloomy 
fancies were those of a once kind heart, too proud to 
break, yet iced and petrified by wrong. The peculiar 
play which habit, or the familiar sting of suffering had 
imparted to his countenance, invested his slightest ex- 
pression with a sarcasm, or a moral. And this to the 
beholder often approached a sense of the harrowing and 
forbidding, the more so, as he possessed a pair of eagle 
eyes, whose restless glance shed here and everywhere, 
like torches carried by night, on a mountain's brow, 
and which appeared ever like the philosopher's lamp, 
of old, seeking, but in vain, for an honest man. 

Apparently, friendless and alone, no one knew who 
he was ; or where he came from. But there were not 
wanting those who, at times, discovered in his manner 
something which betrayed he had not always been the 



THE MISANTHROPE. 43 

desolate being he now was : — that* however, was only 
a conjecture. 

Though not altogether shunning mankind, his chief 
delight (if it could be called so) was to meet them in 
those phantom places, where the vanity of all sublu- 
nary hopes and wishes are depictured in language more 
true and forcible than a vicar's homily ! Thus, one 
time, he might be seen in the churchyard, leaning o'er 
a mouldering tomb ; — the moral of the place ! — start- 
ing and smiling by turns, at the outlawry of his own 
ruined mind : — and as some citizen, more portly than 
usual, passed by — perhaps enjoying, in anticipation, the 
shortly to be realized Plum : or secretly chuckling over 
some lucky hit, in which he had outwitted as great a 
rogue as himself — his eye (the Misanthrope's) would 
glance from him, to the " sic transit " of a neighbour- 
ing stone, with a significance which even the habitual 
apathy of the son of commerce could not always close 
his heart against ; and which, in spite of himself, would 
make him a graver man for the rest of the day ; and, 
perhaps, be the cause of his bestowing a halfpenny or 
two on some poor starving female ! 

At another time, the denizens of a pic-nic party, 
letting gooseberry wine and cold fowl fall, involuntary 
started, as they came upon him, seated, like a second 
Marius, on a ruin of the old castle, which they had 
made an excursion to see. 

And then, the river was to him a volume of deep 
interest ; o'er whose glassy page he whiled away 
hours, watching the straws and other refuse as they 



44 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

glided down the stream, and in the waywardness of 
his nature assimilating them to mankind ; and laughing 
bitterly as each shred and mite meandered in vaunted 
security down " the torrent's smoothness/' regard- 
less of the " dash below," which must inevitably meet 
them. 

It was not, however, only in inanimate things that 
he found sermons, and " thoughts toodeep for tears . 
Mankind, whatever they might have been, were to him 
now, nothing but a speculation — a mystery to conjec- 
ture on : in a word, a compound of mocking atoms, 
with which he had no concern, but whose sayings and 
doings he loved, for some secret reason, to probe and 
fathom. And his thoughts on them partook more of 
the " what might be " of the Seer, than the what was, 
of the actual observer. And these surmises of the " all 
hail hereafter," albeit, the offspring of a deranged brain, 
were invariably on the dark side : the sunny he had no 
heart for ; but he left it to others who, peradventure, 
had not seen, what he had seen — or suffered, what he 
had suffered ! 

To exemplify this morbid feeling : — in the mild, wee 
face of the infant, in whom the fond parent only read 
the pledge of tender hopes and wishes long entertained, 
and now realized, — he, by some telescopic fineness of 
vision, could trace the dark, vice-marked features of 
the denounced of after years — the future robber ! 
or murderer ! And comprehending " the future in 
the instant," his mind's pencil could fill up the back- 
ground, now the downy softness of its mother's bosom 1 



THE MISANTHROPE. 45 

with a terrible show — the gaunt tree of death — and a 
spectacle-waiting crowd !* 

Again, in the playmates of youth, who chased toge- 
ther the gay and brilliant fly, he could single out, with 
the greatest facility, the " to be " deceiver and deceived. 
" Look ! " he would say to some chance spectator, who, 
like himself, might be watching the childish gambol — 
" Look at that curly-headed boy, who calls the fair girl 
his little wife, and fills her lap with flowers." " He will 
be that girl's seducer \" ""Yes, he who now views her 
as innocently as the unfledged dove does its callow nest- 
ling, will love — ruin — and leave her ! to be trodden on, 
like the broken violet which he has just thrown from 
him ! " And, turning aside for a moment, he would 
again proceed with his hypochondriac presentiment, 
regardless, or not noticing the astonishment of the per- 
son he addressed, who, of course, took him to be insane : 
" Behold those two lads playing at ball, — a few years, 
and they will again meet in a scene like this — for the 
same divertisement," (here a smile would steal o'er his 
pallid cheek at the mockery of the conceit,) " and the 
bright sun, may be, will shine as it does now ; and the 
green earth, and the blue sky, will be unchanged ! all 
— all will be the same — but they will be strangely 
altered ! for their faces, which now bloom like the 
opening rose, then, will be black and livid — and words 



She sees her little bud put forth its leaves — 

What may the fruit be yet ? — I know not — Cain was Eve's !" 

Childe Harold. 



46 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

of strange sound, calling much for vengeance, will be 
heard ! — and with eyes flashing forth defiance, they will 
draw each a bright tube ; and then, will follow a flash — 
a report — a deep groan — and one will fall and die — 
and the other will fly — to wander, a second Cain, — far 
from the land, in whose bright scenes he now plays so 
innocent and happy ! " 

The above, to those who have kept friends with the 
world, and the world with them, may seem overdrawn ; 
but it must be remembered, that to 



Think and endure, and form an inner world, 
where the outward fails," 



is the only remaining privilege which the poor Misan- 
thrope has left him ! Shakespeare, who well knew 
how to make misanthropy beautiful, has availed him- 
self of this. Hence his solitary characters ; — Hamlet, 
Timon, and Jacques, are more given to imaginary event 
building and moralizing, than any of his others : wit- 
ness the several speeches which he has put in their 
mouths — " All the world's a stage," " To be, or not to 
be/' &c. 

But to proceed : next to the indulgence of venting 
these " thick coming fancies," the being, of whom this 
is a fleeting sketch, delighted to play fantastic tricks 
with time, by jumping the intervening space between 
the present and the future, and joining them both to- 
gether, in all such cases as the following — before and 
after marriage ; out and in office ; age and infancy, &c 



THE MISANTHROPE. 47 

And these presentments, contrasting, as they did, the 
different bearings of the persons affected by the change, 
were generally more true than flattering to human 
nature ! But what could be expected from one who, 
having experienced their less than nothingness, laughed 
at all such things, as are comprised in lovers' vows, 
professions of friendship, speeches from hustings, cha- 
rity sermons, &c. And who, besides, had long been 
in the habit of going behind the scenes of life's play, 
and viewing the puppet actions of men, as moved by 
the showman nature of the moment, be that showman 
ambition, interest, or hate. Hence, by virtue of this 
imitation, he could often, unawares, dive into the re- 
cesses of the human heart, and bring up the original 
motive of a saying, or doing, ere it had assumed the spe- 
cial appearance of social hypocrisy. To instance this, 
it was his common practice, when any one was more 
strenuous than is wont, in defending the abuses of a 
profession, to ask him point blank, " if he were of that 
profession ? and if so, whether five, or ten thousand, 
were the net profits of his last year's salary?" and, 
vice versa, when any one was equally vehement in his 
reprehensions of the same, he immediately put him 
down as a poor curate — a broken lieutenant — a brief- 
less barrister — a patientless surgeon, &c, according as 
the profession might be, which he abused and proclaimed, 
like Iago, to be a service, where " preferment goes by 
letter and affection." 

This was, sooth to say, rather summary, and would 
not pass harmless at all times, and with all men; as 



48 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

the generality of us, are too apt, like the drunken 
Macedonian of old, to hurl a javelin at him who has 
the hardihood to assert that we are not altogether an- 
gels, and do not choke at the husks of a fifty pound 
note. 

Again, another trait in his character, which bespoke 
more than either of the foregoing, — the turning of the 
stung on the stinger was his prurient prevalency to 
pull down, and desecrate the popular idol of the mo- 
ment. Thus, when a worshipper held up his graven 
image as worthy of universal frankincense and myrrh; 
in so much, that he was a true patriot,* professed 
(tempting warbles!) happiness for the many — no taxes — 
the people, the source of all power — tweedle-dee,tweedle- 
dorum. He would let him run on, plunging and 
throwing out his epithets of praise, like a skilful driver 
does a mettlesome horse, which the groom proclaims to 
be " rather varmint." But when he had exhausted 
himself by the vastness of his eulogy; he would upset 
his whole hypothesis, by quietly exclaiming — " wait 

until he's offered a pension!"! * * * 

* * * * * * * 



And here and there, some stern, high patriot stood, 
Who could not get the place for which he sued !" 

Don Juan. 
t Gov. " Honour ! " 
Til. " A pension ! ! " 
Gov. " Conscience ! " 
Til. " A thousand pounds ! ! ! " 
Gov. " Ha ! thou hast touched me nearly ! " 

The Critic. 



THE MISANTHROPE. 49 

Such was the being, who in the summer of 18 — , 
suddenly made his appearance in the neighbourhood of 

the small town of , and took up his abode in a 

ruined and dilapidated cottage, in the vicinity, which 
had long fallen into ill repute, by its being commonly 
reported, that it was haunted by the ghost of its late 
possessor, a man who had been tried and executed for 
a murder, some years back,, committed under very ag- 
gravated circumstances. In this hovel, (for so long 
uninhabited, it could be called nothing else,) he lived 
alone, without servant, or companion; his whole stock 
of furniture consisting of two chairs, a table, a flock 
bed, laid on the floor, and some necessary articles of 
earthenware; together with a few books, mostly se- 
lected from the modern poets, ranged on what ap- 
peared to have been an old travelling trunk. 

The seclusion of his habits, together with the marked 
satirical expression of his countenance, which at times 
approached something satanical, didnot fail to create con- 
jecture, as well as a good deal of sensation in the neigh- 
bourhood, where he had so mysteriously introduced 
himself; and as his neighbours thought unnecessarily. 
Especially, when it was known, that he had refused to 
hunt with the squire — play back-gammon with the 
parson — drink with the exciseman — and had utterly ne- 
glected to fall ill for the benefit of the doctor. These 
contumacies, of course, obtained for him the epithet 
of a " sly fox " by the first, — an " infidel " by the se- 
cond, — a " smuggler " by the third, — and a " devilish 
unneighbourly fellow " by the last. Added to this, the 



50 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

washerwoman openly protested, that " she had never 
rubbed a rag for him," and, ergo, " he was no gentle- 
man." And the butcher, with whom he never dealt, 
would have called him a " modern Pythagorean," only, 
the gods had not made him " poetical." While, to 
complete the picture, those who had felt the sting of 
his sarcasms, unanimously conjectured he might be 
" an emigre — a retired player — or a whig, radical, or 
to ry;" according to the antipodes of their several po- 
litical faiths. But nowise daunted by these suspicions, 
every one having a right to think his fellow (the peerage 
not excepted,) " an ass, fool, bigot, et iis contrariis," (as 
long as he gives his thoughts no tongue), the recluse 
pursued his wonted tenour, now satirising, now mo- 
ralising; until one morning, he was missed at his 
accustomed haunts — 

" Not up the lawn, not at the wood was he ! " 

That day a farmer going by his lonely dwelling, sur- 
prised at the unusual stillness that pervaded it, stopped 
to listen; but his ear catching no sound, he at last 
forced in the crazy fastenings ; and on a bed, spread on 
the damp floor, found the recluse breathing with diffi- 
culty. " How goes the world with you?" enquired 
the rustic, in his blunt way. "The world!" replied 
the pale being he addressed, his features lighting up 
with a momentary gleam of enthusiasm — " the world 
is very fair ! — It is a lovely world ! " — and he pointed to 
the scene that was visible from the half closed door. 



THE MISANTHROPE. 51 

" But the people," continued he, and a dark shade 
passed over his cheek, " 1 thought them angels— but, I 
found them devils!" " Na! na!" ejaculated the honest 
son of toil, whose sensibilities had never been put to 
the test of drawing comparisons between persons; and 
who seldom associated the evil principle with any thing, 
save a fast trotting nag, which he rode to market; and 
which he proclaimed, "was a downright divil to go;" 
and who besides, thought this a fair opportunity to 
show his patriotism, by sticking up for his fellow- 
townsmen. — " Na, na, you must na' spake so sorely 
of your 'feller creturs,' na, by joles! — for there are 
some very tidy men after all in the world; there's 
Bill Jones, who keeps the ' Pig and Whistle;' — you 
knows Bill ? — now I'll be bound to say, there arnt a 
more honester — ." Here the recluse, sighing deeply, 
interrupted him, with " Perhaps you are right ; — I do 
believe there may be such a thing as a friend, who when 
you are driven into the slough of despair, would put 
forth his hand to save ; — I do also believe, there may 
be a girl, who, when she says she 'loves,' means not to 
deceive; — I do believe," and his voice faltered; — "I do 

believe there are such ; and many worthy, priests, 

whose lives are not a mockery to their words ; — patriots, 
whose cry of liberty is not a pretence to obtain place ; 
and lawyers, who are strictly honest. — There may be 
such — but I — I have not found them ! " — and he sank 
down on the pillow exhausted. 

When again, addressing the astonished rustic, who 
stood wondering at w r hat he could not comprehend ; — 
d 2 



52 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

" And you, my friend, I think have not come here in 
mockery" — " but out of a pure desire to console," — 
he would have said; but the suspicion of a long life 
returned — and viewing the now almost petrified farmer, 
with his piercing eye — piercing even in death, he added 
" but I have still half-a-dozen silver spoons left;" — and 
saying that he expired ! 

Oh, love ! — heart compelling love ! — thou fresh ! — 
thou ever green one ! What soil is too dry, too barren 
for thee ? Thou springest up alike, in the rich pasture 
of the hero's bosom, and the arid waste of him who 
has none to help him ! The poet sows the garden of 
his fancy, thick with bays and rhyme; but every time 
he plucks a leaf, he plucks thy blossom too ! Again, 
the soldier plants his bosom field, with rows of laurels 
and cries of victory; and when he has twined them in 
a wreath for his brow of steel and plume, finds thee, 
blushing like a consenting maid between. Such art 
thou, Almighty Eros ! But who would have looked for 
thee, flowering amid the nettles of the heart of him, 
whose end has just been told? But, so it was — even 
there, thou foundest a place to leaf and blossom in ! 
For on laying him out, the woman employed declared 
he wore a charm about his neck; and on being ques- 
tioned what the charm was, said, " she would not have 
touched it for the world, lest ill should come of it ! " 
But the curate, who never had any charms of his own, 
being therefore not disposed to be frightened by those of 
other people, examined the mystery in question, and 
found it to be a little black silk bag, pendant from a 



THE MISANTHROPE. 53 

ribband ; which, on inspection, was found really to 
contain a charm : — a lock of beautiful light hair ! fast- 
ened by a knot of blue silk, and folded in an envelope 
of pink paper, with the initials of " M. H." on the 
outside, — It spoke volumes, for it told his tale ! 



RINGS. 



" When we parted, we exchanged our rings, and vowed eternal 
constancy. She heard that I was dead — believed it — and was con- 
stant to the dead. She heard I was alive — and was faithless to the 
living. I flew into her arms — was happy as the blest in Paradise. 
Think what a thunder-stroke, Amelia! She gave me back my ring 
— She took her own." — Schiller's Rubbers. 



There is a great deal more in trifles, than the gene- 
rality of mankind are aware of, or, at least, are willing 
to allow. In fact, man, take what pains he will to 
deny it, is quite a child in these matters ; and there 
are moments when they will steal noiselessly across 
his heart, apathetic as it may outwardly seem, like a 
spectre vessel o'er the midnight waters. It is then, a 
gaud — a locket containing the hair of her we love — a 
little flower — a tune of other days — will cause the ever 
revolving sun of busy and dissipated life to stand still 
for a while in the Gibeon of the soul, and make room 
for thoughts, which, in reality, lie " too deep for tears." 

Among the "genus nugce," there is not one class that 
has gained such an ascendancy over the human heart, 
as that of rings. For there is a magic charm — a 



RINGS. 55 

romantic interest associated with a ring ; let it be the 
brilliant sparkler, that the maiden queen of old bestowed 
on the unfortunate Essex, or the penny signet, which the 
" first wrestler on the green" gives to his own — his nut- 
brown maid, which no other bauble possesses. Other 
bagatelles may, by their novelty, their prettiness, com- 
mand our attention for a time, and we may wear them, 
until the gilding of their freshness frets away. But 
with a ring, it is quite different : that is always on our 
finger ; for when once placed there, it becomes, as it 
were, part and parcel of ourselves, and is never to be 
be removed, except with life: sometimes not even 
then ; for instances have frequently occurred, when, 
after death, so pertinaciously has this souvenir been 
retained by the clenched hand of its possessor, that 
every means to obtain it, short of cutting off the finger, 
has proved ineffectual. Such is the interest which is, 
and has been felt for these mute trifles. That woman, 
encircled by the halo of her softness and purity, should 
regard the frail memorials of love and friendship, is not 
surprising; but that their influence should steal o'er 
and take captive the iron-bound sympathies of man — 
full grown, awful man ! is a curious trait in human 
nature, which will ever remain inexplicable. Yet, it is 
not the wrought gold that composes a ring's hoop, nor 
its gemmed eye of dazzling light, that constitutes its 
charm. No ; but it is purely the work of associating 
it with its giver, and the occasion, on which it was 
given, that invests it with the right of naturalizing in 
our sympathies. Besides this, the well-known fact of 



56 



HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 



rings being mixed up with many of our historic recol- 
lections and tales of earnest heart, — not to mention, 
their intimate connexion with some of the happiest 
passages of private life, — the part they play in the little 
dramatic representations of our loves and friendships, 
as the pledges of the first, and the tokens of the last, 
go a great way in substantiating their claim to such a 
settlement. Thus, when called by ambition, or interest 
to foreign climes, — on parting with the blue-eyed girl, 
our own one — our fond one, who had so often hung, a 
thing enamoured, on oar arm — " We exchange rings ;" 
putting ours, as a pledge of our fidelity, on her finger, 
and a promise, that we, in due time, will break the 
cerements of absence, (for the absent are the dead !) 
and once more come back to d^tim our blushing bride ; 
while she gives hers, as a Mentor, to keep her Telema- 
chus from the syren witcheries of the too attractive 
Calypsos of warmer lands. Should, however, her care 
have proved ineffectual — in a word, should we, in our 
absence, have become false and unworthy her love — 
on our return, she does not upbraid us : no ! but 
silently to mark her sense of the wrong we have done 
her, and to cut our heart, in the affecting words of 
Schiller, " She gives us back ' our' ring — she takes her 



own ! 



Again, when he, the friend, who has been so dear to 
us, is called by the voice of the bell to his last home — 
to show that in death we are not divided — he leaves in 
his will, a sum of money to buy a ring, which, when 
he is the companion of the worm, and no longer seen, 



RINGS. 



57 



may, as it sparkles on our finger, remind us how kind, 
how enthusiastic he once was, and recall the many 
happy hours we have spent together — as schoolfellows 
— as partners in the enthusiasm of youthful schemes, 
long, long since blighted ! as companions over the con- 
vivial glass; and lastly, may, by the magic of the 
name inscribed on its black and gilded surface, appeal 
to our sympathies not to hear him wronged, when the 
envious tongue is too busy with his fame ! 

But it is not alone, as the representatives of love 
and friendship, that rings are known to us, but also as 
the symbols of gratitude and forgiveness. The king, 
who yesterday wore the burning jewelry of a hundred 
royal ancestors, — to day, chased by rebel arms from 
his throne, and hunted like a thing proscribed — every 
door being closed in cruel heartlessness against the 
princely wanderer — by those " his former bountyfed," — 
at last finds the denied protection in some woodman's 
cot of simple loneliness. The next morning, ere he 
quits the rude hospitable wicket of his generous pre- 
server, to enter the barque destined to bear him from 
the land once his — now his no more ! he grasps the 
rough, but warm hand of the son of toil, who, when he 
is gone, with curious gaze, finds on his finger a glitter- 
ing gem, its brilliancy dimmed by a recent tear. 
Alarmed at the responsibility of retaining such a 
princely jewel, which his untutored fancy tells him was 
left behind by the oversight of its owner, he rushes 
out to return it to his guest, who again grasps his palm 
and bids him keep it, as a memorial of his gratitude — 

d 3 



58 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

a monarch's gratitude — and that should he ever be 
seated on the throne of his fathers, to bring unto him 
that ring ! 

And lastly, the wild, thoughtless son, of too much 
youth and dissipation, choaked with the husks of mad- 
dening riot, and sated with the gilded treacheries of 
" gay companions round the bowl," resolves — in some 
blessed moment of remorse, when the angel Memory, 
perhaps from the tube of a little street organ, sighs in 
low and broken tones, an old familiar air, fraught with 
early hopes and scenes of childhood, — to return home, 
and ask forgiveness of the grey-haired old man, whose 
heart he has well nigh broken. Tis then, " while (to 
use the pathos of the Evangelist) he is yet a great way 
off," — on the hill that overlooks his native plains, re- 
hailing the quiet, happy scene below him ; — the cottage, 
so white, where his careless boyhood was passed, with 
its incense of smoke arising noiselessly to heaven, as 
if in gratitude — the millstream, by swimming across 
whose liquid waters, contrary to parental solicitude, he 
had first exhibited symtoms of that wild disposition, 
since carried to such a fatal height — every thing the 
same as if he had only parted from them yesterday — 
he alone changed, — a feeling of something like re- 
proach comes over him. And has he left this sinless 
calm for the scenes of brilliant mockery, in which he 
lately was an actor ? He has ! and the thought that 
he has, is of itself sufficient to show that he has sinned 
against heaven, and before his father ; and is no longer 
worthy to be called his son. 'Tis then his father sees 



RINGS. 59 

him, and pities him, and forgetting all the throes his 
follies have cost him— throes passing those of woman ! 
— in spite of his gout, hobbles out to meet him, and falls 
on his neck, and weeping, like any " Christom child," 
calls him, " his own dear boy/' and tells him all is for- 
gotten, and to cheer up, and not think of what is past, 
and " babbles," that he may yet be happy in his " green 
fields." But when he finds that all he can say will 
not comfort him, now awake to his unworthiness, as a 
last resource, our favourite ring is called in requisition ! 
and the old man takes his own from his finger, and, 
with a shaking hand, puts it upon that of his son's. 
Tis then, the young man knows, indeed, that he is for- 
given, and for ever afterwards, wears that witching 
trinket as a guardian angel to keep him from returning 
to his former " riotous living," and when he is seated 
at the convivial board, to whisper softly to him, to take 
a glass, or two less, and not bring his poor old father's 
grey hairs to sorrow and the grave before their time ! 

To some, we may appear as having considered our 
subject too curiously, and they may accuse (if they 
are readers of Shakspeare, which ten to one they are not, 
else they would have more poetry in their souls,) of 
investing a mere '• eight-penny matter" with too much 
interest, or, in other words, making a trifle of as great 
consequence, "an' it were a seal-ring of our grand- 
father's, worth forty marks." To such, we put the 
simple question, — Are ye married ? — wear ye still in 
your bosom, the rose, now full blown, which, when a 
bud, so delighted ye to smell upon the tree? In a 



60 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

word, are ye happy ? If so, ye would not be so un- 
grateful as to dismiss a subject, its theme the glitter of 
a ring, which surely once must have been fraught 
with the dearest solicitudes to ye, (for ye cannot be 
unmindful, that to so small a matter as a plain gold 
hoop, ye owe whatever of earthly happiness ye enjoy; 
indeed, your existence ; for had it not been for that 
plighting trifle, ye never would have been : (we take 
your mother's word for that !) with the brevity of a 
" veni, vidi," notice ? If ye would, we would not ; but 
would rather (if we had the power) clothe it in 
thoughts as glowing and as varied, as the colours of 
the gems which burn in its golden surcint. 

This may seem enthusiasm ; but we were always an 
enthusiast in rings and such like " canorse nugae," 
especially, from the time, that we heard our nurse trowl 
the legend — 

" With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, 
She shall have music wherever she goes " — 

until the moment when we saw one of these sparkling 
witcheries, singing, as it shone, on the rosy finger of 
our lovely, and our true, the minstrelsy of our passion. 
And we may be laughed at, but we never see a 
jeweller's shop without an indescribable emotion of feel- 
ing. To think how many parts, sad and sweet, those 
rings now lying in calm repose, are destined to play 
ere long, in the world of the passions ! How many 
are yearly sent to affection's Carthage ! And then, 
their variety : for nothing is more varied except female 



RINGS. 61 

beauty. First, there is the wedding-ring or ring of 
loving, plain but pure, in companies, of some 
twenty, protected from their more brilliant but less 
chaste associates, by a velvet rampart ; each in its bright 
destiny, the fulfilment of faithful love. Then come, 
to attract and waylay the many, hued witcheries ! The 
diamond, flashing forth aristocracy, the king of gems ; 
the paste, wisely avoiding, by a too near propinquity, 
a comparison with the preceding, yet not unfrequently, 
when alone, taken for the monarch stone ; the ruby, 
roseate synonyme of beauty's lip ; the topaz, glowing 
like a poet's thoughts, rife with fire ; the amethyst, to 
temperance dear, may be, a forget-me-not, convicted of 
inconstancy and changed into a stone ; the turquoise, 
itself misnamed, as it has little of the turk about it, 
but is rather associated with the mild lustre of our 
mistress's eyes if they are blue, but if not with the 
sea and cloud; and finally, the jet, friendship's last 
offering ! like Hamlet tearful, weeping amid the bril- 
liancy that surrounds it ! 

Oh, ye are beautiful, ye gemmed rings ! more so 
than flowers, for ye fade not, but bloom in shine for 
aye ; unless, like woman's heart, ye are ill-used and 
broken. When we forget ye, then will "chaos be 
come again!" No; your fond records are indelibly 
inscribed on our heart, like murdered Rizzio's blood, 
never to be rubbed out by common place, or " scouring 
be they ever so detergent.* For whatever 



* Alluding to the well-known moral, so pleasantly related in the 
introduction of one of the Waverley novels, concerning the never to 



62 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

moments of feeling we enjoyed in youth — moments 
when the world's shallow schemes and small ambition 
were shut out, ye and your kindred poesy, auld syne 
ballads, flowers, &c. &c, were the cause of them. And 
in our age, when we are grown sordid, selfish, and the 
very fac-simile of those, whom, in the heyday of youth 
and spirits, we so ridiculed and pitied, their recollec- 
tion will, by occasionally shedding a gleam of some- 
thing like sentiment over our soul, add a little re- 
spectability to a period of existence which is seldom 
very creditable to human nature. It may be then, as 
by chance, we turn over the contents of an old travel- 
ling trunk, — a ring, a token of some early love, or 
friendship, will drop out. And, as we view it, a mo- 
mentary flash of former enthusiasm will come back to 
us, and forgetting the matter of fact the world has 
taught us, we shall once more sail down the stream of 
our youth, and with that token, wed the Adriatic of 
bygone and better recollections. 

be too much esteemed London Bagman, who, in order to give a proof 
specimen, that his new patent " detergent scouring drops," were of 
la premiere qualite, attempted (glory to him !) to essay their efficacy, 
by rubbing out the " gouts " of Rizzio's blood from the boards of 
Holyrood. 



APROPOS AND MALAPROPOS. 



" The counterfeit presentment of two brothers." — Hamlet. 
" Hyperion to a satyr." — Ibid. 

The world is divided into two great sects, or parties ; 
viz., those born with a silver spoon in their mouth, and, 
those with a wooden ladle. Apropos is the head of the 
former ; Malapropos of the latter. Both of them are 
ancient and of some standing ; for, in looking over 
history's page, we find that Camillus was an apropos, 
when he came just in the nick of time to save his 
countrymen's five shilling pieces from the unwashed 
hands of Brennus and his sans culottes ; and that Clytus 
was a malapropos, when, in contradiction to Alexander, 
the king his crown and dignity, he persisted, " usque 
ad nauseam," (the more fool he !) that " Father Philip" 
was the better man of the two.* 

* In what court of modern Christendom, or Humandom,would you 
now find such a "most particular fellow?" An invention of a 
duplicate of the man, who filled his pond with a score of oysters and 
a double allowance of salt, in order to breed a bed of those " mute in- 
glorious Miltons," would be easier. 



64 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

Nor has the breed, (thanks to the " daddie o V) 

since decreased. For the king of the B may 

well be allowed to claim kindred to the first, 
seeing, that he came over a poor needy adventurer, 
with his shirt, successfully endeavouring ; " superas 
evadere ad auras," vulgarly to bolt through his dis- 
honourables. And surely Malapropos loses nothing by 
the able personification of it, by a brother potentate, 
who — * * * * 

But to proceed in our account of these two great 
personages. Apropos is called the " dear creature" — 
" the delightful man" — " the agreeable fellow," &c. 
While Malapropos, to wit, gets no better designation, 
than " the Marplot" — " the unlucky dog" — " that 
what's his name," &c. This difference, however, in 
nomenclature, will not be wondered at, when we state 
to our courteous reader, that Apropos is an agreeable 
lover, all scent and sentiment, who keeps his appoint- 
ment, to the minute. Malapropos, a foolish brute of a 
husband, who stumbles in just at that crowning mo- 
ment when his presence could particularly be dis- 
pensed with, and spoils sport. (Curse him !) 

Furthermore, Apropos is a rich old miser, who with 
the greatest bonhommie imaginable, kicks the water 
bucket of his life, just at the time when his heir has 
spent his last screw and is divided between laudanum 
and the Serpentine River, and leaves him all his 
fortune. Malapropos, a grey-haired old hunks, who, 
with a malice truly provoking, recovers, just as his 
successor has ordered a tilbury, and established a 



APROPOS AND MALAPROPOS. 65 

figurante on the speculation of his decease ; indeed, in 
all relations of life, the one is in direct antipodes to the 
other. 

Thus, by laughing at stories, which are in reality no 
laughing matter, and by ramming down the throat, a 
Pomfret lozenge, when a cough is troublesome, 
Apropos can charm the " Geordies" of the most cun- 
ning sexagenarian into his pocket. Malapropos, by 
his untowardness, scares those away, which, like 
Gilpin's hat and brutus, were on the way to his ,• inso- 
much as he lets his countenance cream and mantle at 
his uncle's — " 1*11 tell you another very curious thing," 
— and compliments a malade imaginaire with looking 
as healthy as the Leamington Spa. Again, in making 
love, Apropos knows the exact moment when to pour 
into the ear of his "gentle Zitella," his romance of 
softness. On the other hand, Malapropos' nose bleeds 
all over his fair one's blue chalis bodice, as he is making; 
his denouement of hand and fortune ; and, to give a 
finishing stroke to his unluckiness, when he thinks he 
may exercise the privilege of Tabouret and sit down, 
he overshoots the mark, and falls upon his bottom, 
when, of course, his mistress lightly trips off, without 
staying to say — 

" Once more unto the breech, once more ! 

But to continue our illustration : If a friend quarrels, 
and intends to take the grass, Apropos is always ready 
with a pair of hair triggers, and will, a la minute, 



66 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

prepare a chaise, a surgeon, and all the necessary im- 
plements of satisfaction ; indeed, as the advertisements 
have it, will make himself generally useful. While on 
the same occasion, for prevention of any little mis- 
understanding which might otherwise ensue, with a 
species of intempestivity totally inexplicable, Mal- 
apropos prates of worms, coroner's '* quests," and 
trials by jury ; and puts to flight the little moderation of 
liking and courage you may have sported for the enter- 
tainment, by whining out with a horrid face, " that we 
all are liable to accidents — one must fall, and there is not 
such a merciless beast in the world, as your loaded 
pistol." 

All ease, compliment, and bonhommie, Apropos in- 
sinuates himself into the good graces of every one, and 
is always making friends : vice versa, Malapropos loses 
his, and is ever getting into scrapes by his system of 
blundering. But can it be wondered at ? For if you 
ask him to dinner, and treat him to a bottle of your very 
best particular champagne, (not Charles Wright's !) he 
will, with the most imperturble gravity, ask you if there 
has been a good crop of gooseberries this year ; and 
then, he will take up your silver candlesticks, (which 
have been heirlooms in your family for years, and have 
been furbished up, expressly for his coming,) and 
tnrning them round with his finger and thumb, will 
begin technically to admire their workmanship, solidity, 
elegance of design, &c, &c, and then, placing them 
again on the table, will patriotically conclude with, 
" really, they have lately arrived at such a height of 



APROPOS AND MALAPROPOS. 67 

improvement with these thing at Sheffield, that there 
is no knowing them from real silver; indeed, they 
look just as well !" 

And with the necessary variations, the same with 
your wife's foreign shawl, your daughter's gold chain, 
and your own brilliant ring; each of which, in its 
turn, he, impromptu, apostrophises, as the "finest speci- 
men of our Norwich looms." — " A very pretty chain 
that, Miss ; if you don't tell it, no one will know it 
from gold !" — " The most beautiful Bristol pebble he 
has ever seen !" — (that's your ring.) 

But this is not one tithe of his endearing accomplish- 
ments ; in a word, he is a regular Regius Professor 
in the art of making himself disagreeable. For if 
there be a raw — a sore point in a man's character, 
moral, or professional, he is sure to gall it ; or, if there 
be any " noli me tangere" subject particularly ob- 
noxious to any one, he is certain to land on the 
debatable part of it — he cannot help it for the life of 
him. Thus, if, like Dr. Johnson, you have had the 
honour of having a relation elevated to the rope-age,* 
you may set it down as secure, that he will not be long 
in your company, without making some ugly allusions 
to Jack Ketch, gallows, the price of hemp, &c. &c, or 
mutatis mutandis ; should you be a Whig, (some people 

* Alluding to the stale Joe of the literary Elephant, so often 
reiterated in "journals, medleys, mercies, magazines," — anent his an- 
nouncing in form, to his sweetheart, that he had had a relation hanged, 
and her rejoinder, that, though she could not boast of that family 
distinction, she had many of her name who highly deserved it ! In 
which assertion, I believe, she was not peculiar. 



68 



HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 



have that misfortune,) he will incontinently d — n all 
Whigs and Whigmeleeries. 

Again, are you are a coward, (no offence, Hal !) 
encomia on bravery, Lord Nelson, and the Nile are 
with him the order of the day. In vain, after many 
attempts to cough him down, as they say in the house, 
like the Roman citizens at their gladiators' show, you 
turn up your thumbs in disapprobation ; in vain, too, 
you twist your mouth into the shape of every letter in 
the alphabet, from round O, to crooked Z — writhe and 
wriggle on your chair, and chirrup like a house spar- 
row in hatching time, till, losing all patience, and 
smarting under his infliction, you exclaim 

" No more of that, Hal, an' thou lov'st me. * 

He will take no hint ; but, on the contrary, will return 
to the charge with forty additional horse vigour, and, in 
the end, you are obliged to throw him out the win- 
dow, or trundle him down stairs, in your own defence. 
A few words more, and our Plutarchian parallelism 
will be complete. Apropos, like Sheridan, has all the 
lucky hits, the happy sayings, the brilliant repartees. 
Malapropos, the bulls, blunders, and contretems. Take 
a few examples ; if you speak of Moore's poetry to the 
last, he, as matter of fact as the Poets' Corner in a 
country journal, thinks you mean Francis Moore phy- 
sician, his almanac, and declares with the wisdom of a 
Solomon all in the wrong — " I like his lines on April 
very much indeed ;" and forthwith he begins to repeat — 



APROPOS AND MALAPROPOS. 69 

" If man his health did duly weigh and choose, 
And the non-natural rules would rightly use—"* 

and then shewing his " dentes sapientiae," adds with a 
dubious shake of the head, " but I think we ought not 
to place too much reliance on his statement of the 
weather ; " or, should you speak of Hervey's Medita- 
tions, he'll tell you, without relaxing a muscle, " it is 
a capital sauce for soles, and that he never uses any 
other at his table/' Or should, too, some hair-brained 
collegian, just enfranchised from "little goes" and 
Joy's Academics, f volunteer a florid descant on the 
pleasures of travel, and of the land where 

" The poet's heart and the painter's hand, 
Are both divine " 

Immediately, uttering a sigh loud enough to upset her 
Majesty's ship Pike, he proclaims, that he has also a 
great desire to see " Yorkshire, Wiltshire, and all those 
foreign parts, only, really his many avocations and busi- 
ness — business must be attended to, you know !"'* * 
* * # # * * 

" Ah ! ah ! two marvellous clever fellows these ! I 
should like vastly to see them. But you'll laugh at 
me, when I tell you, I always took Apropos and Mal- 
apropos to be inanimate things. The first, any thing 
well timed ; such as, for instance, a mutton chop after 

* Vide Moore's Almanack for April, 1834. 
f Joy, a celebrated Alma Stultz. 






70 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

a journey, or a pair of slippers waiting your return from 
a wet ride. And Malapropos, of course, the reverse ; 
a bedstead inhabited, or a smoking chimney. And 
pardon, even now, for doubting that there really are 
such persons extant ; on the contrary, are they not 
beings purely of your imagination?" " No; 'pon 
honour ! Apropos is an Englishman, though of French 
extraction ; and Malapropos, who is his cousin, an 
Irishman." " And to convince you, if you'll come to 
the window, I'll point them out to you, for they are ge- 
nerally to be seen in the streets —but en passant take care 
you don't mill my wife's Sevres, — ha ! you have done 
it !" "I beg ten thousand pardons, my dear sir, but 

" " There, never mind, it is of no consequence 

as it happens ; only I have not now to shew you, 
malapropos at least. But here, do you observe that 
genteel young man, his appointments all in harmony ; 
he snatches up that little white headed child, who has 
gotten entangled in the wheels of an omnibus — he is 
Apropos." 

" Now for Mai, (the unlucky dog !) — let me see — oh, 
look there, at that fellow wrapped up in a great coat, 
with some dozen capes, and these the dog days." " 1 
don't discover his latitude." " No ! why you can't 
miss him, for he leaves a trail behind him ; as he has 
just over the way, run his umbrella in that costermon- 
ger's eye ; a little further, tripped up a baker's boy with 
a rice pudding. But now you have a fine opportunity 
of seeing him, for, lo ! he returns ; and I'll bet you a 
bottle of claret, he walks extempore into that cellar, 



APROPOS AND MALAPROPOS. 71 

where they are melting tallow. I told you so, he does, 
by Jupiter ! a^d emerges all grease, as fine a London 
dip as ever was snuffed. But we must not dwell, as 
Horace's father,* would have said, on such a wicked 
subject, lest we be taken for the " great sublime, " we 
have attempted to draw ! 



* Horace's father was a knight of the hammer. 

f" Knowledge for the People") 



THE DIARY OF A DETENU FOR 
DEBT. 



Oh ! no he paid them never, 

But received them when they came, 

With a bow polite as ever, 

And they tried to look the same. 

Parody. 

Tuesday, — Rose at twelve, after having dreamt all 
night of Wilkie's " Distraining for Rent," catchpoles, 
spunging-houses, " et omne." Mem, rather ominous. 
Took my chocolate, however, and inserted a small quo- 
tation of Cogniac by way of salvo for the blues ! But 
the democrats would not hearken to reason, so even 
let them have their own way, and proceeded to sum- 
mon my mental corporation into a committee of ways 
and means, and to legislate, en passant, on Prince's 
mix's impertinence to me, the other evening, in his 
shop, about his bill ; — due however to self to state, 
that I lost the " opera/' and a Ute-a-t4te with " the 
prettiest creature fresh from Milan," as Byron has it, 
in offering to compound with the rascal, and the rest of 







/// / // //, 



."/,/• 



//////'/_ / //'/ 









THE DIARY OF A DETENU FOR DEBT. 73 

the gang (query press gang). But would'nt come into 
proposition ; would have the bill, the whole bill, and 
nothing but the bill ! " or he'd . 

Wonder will he take steps, the Muscovite ! as he 
threatened? (and here, par parenthese, how I abominate 
those nauseous law phrases : — a proper slang for rogues 
though ! — N. B. every lawyer one). John tells me he 
saw the aforementioned savage in close confab last 
night with two ill-looking articles, known to be of the 
genus — Tipstaff. No doubt he had an eye to his bird, 
shall therefore keep close in the Home department. 

One o'clock. — Reflections broken by a professor of 
" La gaie Science," who, Apollo be good to us ! volun- 
teered the following under my window : — 



Of debt, pretty lads, beware ! — beware ! 

And never fall in debt : 
For if you do — you'll go you know where 

Then never fall in debt ! " 



Cursed personal ! so sent John to put the stop note 
to her qavers, (for it was a feminine). But who would 
have^ thought it? He no sooner opened the door, 
than the ci-devant ' Sontag ' and another rushed in, 
making no more of his prostrate corpus than the 
horses of a French diligence would of the dust in the 
Rue Vivienne. In a word, it was the bums ! ! (Phoebus ! 
what a designation !) 

"A devilish fine stroke of genius that ! " who would 
have thought the " rump-fed " rascals being up to it ! 
but what was to be done ? I " sported my oak " for 

E 



74 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

deliberation. To leap out of the window would griev- 
ously derange my tie, a la Brummell, and was therefore 
remanded for trial " this day six months." Should I 
send for young Lance Magog of the 9th to " cut me off 
the villain's head," and " throw the quean in the chan- 
nel ? " as Sack and Sugar says in the Play. That might 
be more practicable, — but then, the law protects those 
catchpole Vardarelli so atrociously : — vide " Burn's 
Justice passim." 

A thought struck me — I would receive them en Pa- 
tron ; so taking up a work, and throwing my feet with an 
air of fashionable lassitude on the fender, when they 
again summoned a surrender, I cried out " entrez ! " 
and two villainous faces made their appearance. 
"Your appellation, Sar, if you please?" " Timothy 
Newgate." " And that petticoat concern behind 
you ?" pointing to the songstress who yet wore mas- 
querade. " Jim Fleet." " Ha ! a sort of court of 
ease to the Old Bailey ! appropriate, certainly, but de- 
ci-ded-ly low ! Hem ! my good fellers, if you'll sit 
down, when I have finaled the last volume of the 
' Roue,' (a piquant affair, that ! The people of the 
' New Monthly ' say, the Hero is intended for me) 
I'll attend to you." 

But it would not do. — N. B. Never attempt that 
sort of thing again with any who don't use Rowland's 
" Kalydor." Might as well undertake to civilize the 
Cherokee Indians, or the inhabitants of " John-street, 
Adelphi !" For one, who answered to the criminality 
of Newgate, in a patois, I did not understand, gave 



DIARY OF A DETENU FOR DEBT. 75 

tongue to what sounded like the following — errors ex- 
cepted — " I say, Jim, how scaly him sports the 
Johnny ! a' comes it fine, does n't a'?" " I'm blessed 
if a' does n't ! " replied he of the petticoats, with a 
knowing nod. And then, turning to me, with his 
mouth on half cock, and his enormous red nose look- 
ing me full in the face ; — " Well, thee be'st a nation 
nice'un, I don't think ! — but, come, pitch us no more 
of that 'ere gammon, for I be blowed if I stands it ! but 
deliver us your thingumees, as we says, of the law." 

Comprehending more from their gestures than their 
words, I threw them my keys ; and in half an hour, 
had the very agreeable satisfaction of seeing " my 
ancient," as well as " most domestic ornaments," ap- 
praised and inventoried by these second edition of 
Otway's " greasy rogues ; " and "several villainous jests 
at my undoing/' like the Mercurial bust, thrown, 
gratis, into the bargain. In the afternoon sent to my 
legal adviser, to know if I had not better get some 
friend to be bound for me ? — received a laconic note in 
reply, that I had better, for the present, let all my 
friends remain " in boards;" multum inparvo meaning. 
Wednesday. — Misericorde ! Begin to find executions 
no joke ! — never could abide them — as when a boy, 
remember always used to snich of a hanging day, be- 
cause had to pass the gallows in my way to school ; 
and now to have one under one's very nose ! They 
say an Englishman's house is his castle, and a pretty 
one it is, as per example ! — if it is to be stormed, 
and " bums " thrown in it at the beck of every little 
E 2 



76 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

bourgeois, whom you may chanced to have honoured by 
purchasing his wares. Mem. shall draw up a memo- 
rial for Ballot Lovestate, M. P. to lay on the table 
next session, praying for an abolition of this arbitrary 
abuse of the liberty of the subject ; when, no doubt, two 
thirds of the house, for private reasons, will give their 
most cordial support to the measure : probatum est ! 

One o'clock, F.N. — While lunching, imagined a 
smart thing, which, as it was rather German to my 
situation, and not to be guilty of misprision of punning, 
I made a mem. of. It was to wit — that though a laurel 
is an honour to a man, a bay leaf (Bailiff) is not! — 
Not bad, that, by Hook ! — will do for the " United," 
if not, give it to " Comic Annual " Hood. 

Three o'clock. — John brought in the papers. Read 
a florid description of the Hon. Mrs. Vernon Bon ton's 
fancy bal, in the " Morning Post ; " and find that Sir 
Dumpling Dolittle, who is as fat as a sleeping Cupid 
" disfigured " Hamlet. " O that this too solid flesh 
would melt ! " and Slender Simpkins, Esq., his friend, 
Falstaff! ! Must have been rich ! — or, as Horace says, 
" Magnum spectaculum uterque! " But to proceed — was 
in the middle of a long account of " Venetian peasants, 
" broom girls," " fair Circassian slaves," &c. when a 
voice, from behind, strongly impregnated with what 
the inhabitants of the East, call " Barclay and Perkins' 
Entire," grumbled — " My hies! Jim, if old Jenkins 
is n't a Bankrupt ! we have lost a fine job there, my 
tulip." Looking round, found the two guardians of 
Habeas Corpus leaning in an a la Sevigne attitude over 



THE DIARY OF A DETENU FOR DEBT. 77 

the back of my chair. I reconnoitred them with my 
glass for a moment, and then pocketed the affront, and 
also the paper, and walked to the window — leaving 
them, I suspect, to the entertainment of any thing but 
heroical notions of my character, as the interjection 
which shortly followed, of " gallows haughty, by God ! " 
verified. 

At dinner, another instance of their free and easi- 
ness appeared. For, after gorging themselves with my 
maintenon cutlets until only one, like the last man at 
the opera, remained ; one of them drew a halfpenny 
from his pocket, and giving it a technical spin with his 
finger and thumb, spluttered out, his mouth full of 
half unmasticated materiel — " I say, Jim, I'll toss you 
for that ere odd'un — man or 'oman ? " By all that's 
levelling ! there was no standing this, so taking up a 
bottle of wine from the table, I retired to my bed-room, 
and, locking my door, smoked sixteen segars out of 
pure vexation, without tasting one of them, although 
they were of la premiere quality. 

All the while, he of the petticoats, with a bottle of 
my old crusted port, " neat as imported," in one 
hand, and a huge " Cader Idris" of bread and cheese 
in the other, patrolled up and down the yard below, 
like the sentinel in Pizarro. Nor was his comrade a 
whit less cautious, as the frequent gurgling of liquor, 
as it descended his oesophagus, proclaimed him to be 
planted at my door. 

At ten, bottle and segars being extinct, went to bed 
inwardly cursing all duns and their myrmidons, and 



78 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

morally determining to give, in the morning, my 
second best Petersham to my valet, as it approached 
their detested colour in hue. 

Thursday. — Clara's brother called ; would not have 
him know " my little go" for the world. For, besides 
its breaking off my match with his sister, (she has 
10,000 charms, i. e. pounds !) he would report it in 
every house between this and St. James's, being, as he 
is, a regular " daily Dispatch" for scandal. So, desired 
John to say I was engaged for the present, but in a 
few minutes would see him. In the meanwhile, I pre- 
vailed upon the followers of " Lex," by dint of promises 
and such like pie -crust assurances, to incarcerate them- 
selves in a brace of my Stultz made coats and nonde- 
scriptives ; and, after a little titivating under the hands 
of John, I thought they might pass, malgre that the 
latter of the afore -mentioned vestments sat rather 
tight on their quatier de Clinkers. 

So I went down and presented them to Waldegrave, 
as Dr. Killpatient, my physician, and Mr. Drama, my 
apothecary. I trembled, as you may well suppose, 
while the ceremonial was going on for nodding their 
skulls, the rogues strode forwards, as if about to give 
him their professional clap on the shoulder. I shall 
never forget how Waldegrave stared ; but then their 
extremely fashionable costume seemed to satisfy him, and 
I have hopes that he did not discover my ruse. After 
the usual topics of the parks, the theatres, and the 
last new adultery had been discussed, in getting up to 
depart, Waldegrave inquired, " Ah ! by the bye, Mac- 
highflyer, why were you not at the club last night ? we 



THE DIARY OF A DETENU FOR DEBT. 79 

missed you very much, 'pon honour !" I pleaded a 
violent Pompilius* bill-ious attack. At this, he, on 
whom I had gratuitously conferred the honorary dis- 
tinction of a diploma, set up a laugh seldom practised by 
the faculty, and which partook very little of the locality 
of Grosvenor-square ; while the apothecary commenced 
the most unsurgical operation of thrusting his tongue 
in his cheek. Clara's brother stared, first at one and 
then at the other, and, as he took me by the hand; 
told me to " take care of myself, for I did look rather 
distressed." 

What did he mean ? Surely he does not suspect 
the truth ! But visitors, like misfortunes, seldom come 
single ; for in the afternoon old Waldegrave drove his 
" galloping dreary duns" to the door, (having heard, no 
doubt, of my being indisposed from his son,) atrociously 
actuated to immolate me at the green baize altar of 
his idol " whist." 

Well, really these old men are the greatest bores 
in—" Ah ! Mr. Waldegrave, how d'ye do, sir ? This 
is kind. Pray take a seat ; and how are the ladies at 
home ? We were just talking of you, and wishing you 
might drop in to make up a rubber, and — but I beg 
pardon — my friends, Dr. Killpatient and Mr. Drama. 
Well, shall we sit down? We cut for partners, I 
suppose ; the two highest and the two lowest. Tis as 
we sit ; you and I, Mr. Waldegrave, and the Doctor 
and his friend." 

* Vide " Don Juan" for the term. 



80 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

And down we sat ; but those vulgar dogs ! with 
their " two for we," — " they trays/' and " the Jack of 
spades is trumps." If the old man had not been as 
deaf as an adder, all would have been up. Positively, 
these things ought to be managed better ; and as these 
attaches of the law are so much now-a-days in the 
company of men of fashion, they ought to be well 
educated men, or, at the worst, poor devil authors 
or Welsh curates. 

Friday. — So John tells me, Mrs. Sewin, the fish- 
woman, has been here, crying and whimpering, a la 
" Quickly," that she is a " lone woman, and her chil- 
dren will be on the parish ;" a likely story, when bread 
is so cheap ! And then, her impudence, to say, If I 
would only pay her half of her bill, she would leave 
the other lay over till another time ; or if I wasn't able 
to pay her the rest she would never ask me for it. I 
am glad John sent her away. 

Two o'clock same morning. — Am determined those 
rascals shall do something, instead of sitting down all 
day on the floor and drinking my wine, like Saib and 
Hassan, in " The Castle Spectre ; " so made them 
assist while I superintended the erection of my new 
billiard table. 

Six o'clock. — Ha, ha, ha ! to think little Isaac, the 
Jew, has called to implore of me to let him have his 
plate " backsh again, and he would say he leantsh it." — 
" Cunning Isaac ! no doubt your aunt used always to 
call you little Solomon. But I can't exactly do that, 
Isaac. Think of my honour. Ha, ha, ha !" 



THE DIARY OF A DETENU FOR DEBT. 81 

Saturday. — Heigho ! am afraid I am growing pale. 
My moustaches, too, seem to droop and change 
colour. Shall take them off, as well as my whiskers, 
and put them carefully by in a portfeuille. Besides, 
must not forget to order John to inspect my wardrobe, 
and sprinkle my drawers with lavender — pshaw ! no ; 
but with what its name ? lest they imbibe some un- 
pleasant odour by being so long unworn. 

Eleven o'clock. — Didn't know what to do, so looked 
over my carte pay ante roll, but could not get through 
half of it, it tired me so abominably ; so shoved the 
bills into a drawer, and turned the key upon them, won- 
dering how any one could have the patience to compose 
such atrocities. Tat tat went the door — the postman's 
knock. Something for me, by Jupiter ! John brought 
in a letter — opened it, found it was from Maria, en- 
closing a five pound note, " thinking it might be use- 
ful. " Poor thing ! I rather suspect I have used that 
girl ill ; but — atism ! — atism ! how confounded strong 
this snuff is. 

In the evening looked for a segar — diable ! none in 

my case. Sent John to Princes-mix's to get a dozen ; 

but he refused to send them until I had settled for the 

others. Impertinent ! I shall report him ; and if he 

gets afterwards another customer in his shop, my 

name's not Diddler Machighflyer. 

* * * * * * ^ 

Monday. — So it seems, I am, to be translated after 
all. Cursed annoying, must say, that a gentleman 
cannot encourage in a liberal way his tradesmen, 
e 3 



82 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

without the ungrateful wretches turning upon him, and 
taking the law in their own hands. But there, dismals 
to the old one ; it is only serving a few weeks in the 
fleet, as Hook would say ; and as the Crockford men 
have promised to dine every day with me, each in his 
turn, I shall do pretty well ; that is, always supposing 
the Fleeters keep a French cook. Egad, if they don't, 
must petition Parliament in my behalf ; for, poz, never 
could tolerate an English Ude. Twelve o'clock. — 
Carriage at the door, " John, if any one inquires for 
me for this next six weeks, mind, I am gone on a 
secret mission to the island of O-Y-U; you under- 
stand : and, John, don't forget to order the new liveries 
at Stultz's against my return. Coachman drive on. 



THE RETURNED LETTERS. 



Yet, — oh ! yet, — thyself deceive not — 
Love may sink by slow decay, 

But by sudden wrench believe not, 

Hearts can thus be torn away. — Byron. 



The black sealed letter, which tells the death of a 
friend or relative, comes like a cypress on the brow of 
happiness, and, for the time being, excludes all conso- 
lation, and our thoughts become as sombre as our 
garments, the 

" customary suits of solemn black." 

Yet, heart rending as this is, it is nothing when com- 
pared with the utter agonization which awaits the 
reception of the missive, that treats of affection's 
death ; — the cruel difference of the style, in the substi- 
tution of plain Sir, for the former "Dear George, — 
Henry." &c. &c. The shaking of the hand that wrote it, 
signifying that it was like the death-warrant of Charles 



84 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

the First, a sad necessity; — the tear on the paper, to 

show that he was still dear — * * * 

* * ^ * * * * 

***** * 

In one of those small streets, which give into many 
of the larger thoroughfares of the metropolis, and 
and whose juxta position, contrasting with the bustle 
and gaiety of the latter, chills the warm blood of the 
pedestrian, and forcibly reminds him of some broken 
hearted being, led by the well intentioned care of 
friends, to " banish his regret," amid the glare and 
brilliancy of the ball room ! 

In the second floor of a house situated in one of the 

above mentioned gloomy passages, sat William D , 

his head resting upon his hand, apparently deeply en- 
gaged in memory's world, — perchance wandering in 
her green places with some fond one of other days ! 
and his thoughts only recalled to this lower sphere by 
the distant echo of an ever-grinding organ ; or the 
touching note of some houseless female, warbling " Isle 
of beauty ! " whose emaciated face told it had been no 
isle of beauty to her ! At that moment one of those 
loud quick knocks, to which we are apt to associate 
evil, was heard at the door below; and, in a few 
minutes, one of the landlady's children entered his 
apartment, and placed a square brown paper parcel on 
the table. The human heart is a kind of seer — it fore- 
bodes misfortune, and trembles at its approach. In 
the present instance it was so. For as William at 
tempted to light his candle, his hand shook so violently 



THE RETURNED LETTERS. 85 

he could not reach the wick: — he sat down — and then, 
at last succeeded, by dint of pushing the candle in the 
bars, to light it. He approached the ill-omened par- 
cel — he took it up — could it be for him ? and was it 
not a mistake ? No, it was all right — the directions 
were to him — it was his Mary's hand — that hand never 
seen too oft ! — what could she mean? 

With a trembling hand he undid the envelope, and 
a letter dropped out; — he opened it, and found — oh 
God! that he was loved no more; — and that all his 
letters were sent back; together with the little remem- 
brances, which she had cherished as coming from him. 
The ' Album,' in whose tinted pages, at her express 
desire, he had copied some of the youthful effusions of 
his muse; — the ring which, in a playful hour of fond- 
ness, he had put on her finger, as a locum tenens for the 
dearer token he shortly hoped to place there. Yes ! 
she had sent back all; — had made no reservation for 
one on whose knee she had often sat — whose arm had 
embraced her — whose kiss she had taken and returned — 
and with whom she had walked on the mountain, in 
the plain, near the silent river — and whom she had 
declared she loved; — whose visit she looked for, like a 
sunny day, and whose parting she wept — 

" Is Conrad gone ? " 

All this passed through William's brain in a moment; 
and after all this, could she be false ? — No, it was all a 
phantasy. — 

" If she be false, O, then, heaven mocks itself ! 
I'll not believe it ; " 



86 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

And again he took up the hand writing, — " She de- 
mands her letters ! " said he, bitterly, — " yes, Mary 
demands her letters; — she shall have them — but it 
shall be from my hand ; — the hand she once pressed, 
and now casts from her ! " And, unlocking a small 
box, where he had treasured them as in a heart, he 
collected them together, and sealed them in a packet; 
and that night, lonely and broken-hearted, mounted 
the coach to M , where she lived. 

Oh love ! thy chains are rosy blossoms, but they 
want the captive's iron of security ! — A doubt, a word, 
a thought, has broken them 'ere now ! — and then, they 
are not proof against the canker worm of scandal. A 
few months, and the twain had met all smiles, and 
parted all tears; after some halcyon days spent in 
giving and receiving happiness, such as young hearts 
only can feel, who love for love alone. And when the 
hour of separation came, he left her to seek and push 
his fortune for her sake — his own, his fond one ; bear- 
ing in his bosom much of future bliss, and a lock of 
her fair hair, which she had severed, to be at once an 
amulet and remembrance to him; for lovers have faith 
in such innocent superstition. 

So loved they each other. But a noxious reptile 
seizing the advantage of his absence, and when all was 
confidence! crawled its slimy tail o'er his fair name, 
and croaked that he was false ! And, if to worship her 
shrine in his heart, and to feel rapture at the mention 
of her name, and when hearing a song she used to sing 
him, were to be false, — then he was false indeed ! But 



THE RETURNED LETTERS. 87 

when did truth ever escape the cruel fangs of false- 
hood? Long, Mary combated with the hateful sus- 
picion; until, in an hour of injured feeling, when hardly 
pressed by the tempter, she, with many a tear, returned 
his letters, and vowed never to love him more ! 

But to return to William ; — it was late on the second 
day when he entered — and as he drew near the familiar 
landmarks of former joys, his heart sank within him. 
Ah ! why does not memory die with happiness ? He 
reached the well known -threshold, where he had often 
been so welcome; — he knocked at the door, — it re- 
ceded to his knock; — he entered, and stalked in like a 
ghost, pale and haggard. Mary was seated with her 
back towards the door, in the little parlour, where, in 
happier hours, they were wont to meet ; when, turning 
her eye, she almost gave a shriek, as he passed, and 
sank into a chair, covering his face with his hands. 
Twice he essayed to speak, when " tears, such as angels 
weep, burst forth ! " 

At last, in a broken voice he approached her — 
" Mary, you desire the return of your letters ?" She 
assented with a nod, and then turned away to conceal 
her emotion. " There they are!" — and he placed a 
small packet on the table: — and then, regarding her 
with a look of utter wretchedness, he moved towards 
the door; — but still he lingered; — it was parting for 
the last time; — they might never meet again; — flashed 
across his mind in vivid bitterness. He caught her — 
he strained her in his arms ; and then, with a heart 
piercing cry, rushed from the room ! 



88 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

Some days afterwards, on examining the packet 
which he had left, Mary found, among her letters, one 
from himself. It was written with much pathos ; and 
there were some passages, never afterwards thought of 
without a pang; — particularly one, where he spoke his 
conviction that she would not altogether forget him. 
The following is the extract alluded to. — " In the busy 
cares of domestic life, and the witcheries of pleasure, 
you will have little time to think : and the remem- 
brance of our connexion will be as dim and as shadowy 
as a dream! — But yet, you cannot forget me altogether; 
— no, a voice will speak for me in your greatest enjoy- 
ments — at the gay ball — in the summer's walk — nay 
even when you have the baby in your lap, which ought 
to have been mine. — 'Tis then, a little street organ 
will warble one of my favourite tunes, and you will 
push the child from you, and think alone of him who 
once loved you so dearly — so enthusiastically ! " 

Time passed, as time will, making many changes ! 
and Mary was married, and the mother of a rosy 
child ; — and William had died some years before, of a 
consumption, at Genoa ; where he had gone to seek 
some soothment in the change of scene. The delights 
of that delicious country were many ; but they were of 
no avail ; he heeded them not, for his eyes like his 
heart were far away : — until at last, wasting by degrees, 
as has been before said — he died ! 

It was one summer's evening, in the July of 18 — , 
when all was hushed, save that " drowsy tinkling," of 
which poets speak, when a little organ, of peculiar 



THE RETURNED LETTERS. 89 

sweet tone, was heard in the streets of M . And 

the man, with the tact of people of his class, con- 
tinually changed his stop, in order as it would seem, 
that he might hit upon some tune, whose recollections 
might at once open the hearts and purses of his 
hearers. After many attempts of this nature, he at last 
struck up a little melancholy air, whose low and broken 
tones assimilated well with that song, which L. E. L. 
has enshrined in her bird-like verse — 

" I heard it at the evening's close, 
Upon my native shore — 
It was a favourite song with those 
Whom I shall see no more ! " 

Scarce had the tune commenced, when a neigh- 
bouring window was hastily opened, and a fair hand 
threw out a shilling. Surprised at the unusual gratuity, 
the man looked up, when a deep sob caught his ear. — 
It was Mary; — and the words of her lover had come 
to pass; — for she had heard his favourite song, and 
wept bitterly ! 



KIDDYISM* 



(Mer.) — " O their bons, their bonsf" 

Romeo and Juliet. 

Kiddyism is a very ancient profession, and, indeed, 
its professors, like the pristine Romans, are very tena- 
cious of its antiquity. Its exact origin is dark and 
uncertain, though some contend that Adam was the 
first Kiddy, because he adorned his body with leaves ; 
while others, with more justice, say, that Joseph was 
the primeval Kiddy, insomuch as his father made him 
a kiddy coat of many colours, which coat, he after- 
wards left in the grasp of the accomplished wife of 
Potiphar. 

Kiddyism is the art of being decidedly different from 
the rest of one's fellows, and of knowing the art how to 
suit stockings, hats, and gloves to each hour, day, 
month, and season of the year, in the same manner as 
an experienced piscator does his baits. It is also the 

* Kiddy is the provincial sobriquet for a fop or exquisite ; it is 
derived from their partiality to kid gloves. 



J 



KIDDYISM. 91 

art of having things natty and superior in quality and 
quantity to those of others, as in the minutice of snuff- 
boxes, smelling bottles, shirt pins, eye glasses, watch 
guards, and pocket handkerchiefs, &c. &c. Therefore, 
as its chief end is to make its votaries exclusive, noto- 
rious, and unlike the residue of the world, when a 
kiddy performs any thing, let it be ever so insignificant, 
where he switches his cane, or ties his neckcloth, it 
must not be like other people, or he forfeits his kiddy- 
ship. 

A Tyro, before he becomes a kiddy, must endure 
three several mutations ; he must first be a suckling, 
or pickle, next a major, and last a perfect kiddy ; going 
through the same process, as certain lepidopterous in- 
sects do, ere they assume their permanent forms. 

A kiddy has been supposed by some naturalists 
to be of a distinct order of human beings ; that is, one 
immediately between a man and a woman — in short, 
a neuter. 

In personal appearance he is a long-shaped, wasp- 
waisted, bodyless biped, with features made delicate by 
a copious application of all the cosmetics that are puf- 
fed in newspapers and magazine wrappers. His head, on 
the outside, is plentifully laden by nature with long bushy 
skeins of hair, as if the fickle goddess wished to make 
the amende honorable for her scant furnishment of the 
interior. Some of the hair, by constant application of 
the wash, he forces to stand on end, " like quills upon 
the fretful porcupine;" while each side of his peri- 
cranium is fiercely defended by a chevaux de frise of 



92 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

greasy pilosity. He is not carnivorous in his appetites; 
his nutriment being mainly vegetables, and including, 
when he can procure them, plum cakes, jam tarts, 
custards, jellies, and blanc mange; all of which he 
devours in large quantities, and with amazing dis- 
patch. 

In disposition, he is very harmless and sociable ; 
being by nature gregarious ; when the weather is fine 
he may be seen linked arm in arm with others of his 
genus, walking the streets, " the observed of all ob- 
servers ; " or lounging in bazaars, exhibitions, and the 
emporiums of pastry. A constant companion of the 
ladies, he shares their frowns and smiles in common with 
their poodles, monkeys, and parrots ; whilefr om their 
society he is never exiled either by the vetos of papas, 
or the ostracisms of the fair creatures themselves, — his 
harmlessness being so well known and authenticated. 

The language of a kiddy is an indescribable patois 
selected from the slashed vowels and murdered conso- 
nants of his own and other languages — a sort of larded 
tongue. It is plenteously mixed with " de — mee," 
" shall I have the pleasure," " 'pon my soul it's true," 
and the French words " voila" " debut," Ute-a-Ute,'* 
" a-la-mode," &c. ; and with many other " holiday and 
lady terms." 

In all parties, and in all companies, he affects the 
connoisseur in music and pictures ; protesting that he 
is a proficient in the first, on the strength of occa- 
sionally howling some notorious love rondoletto, or 
marine bravura, and in the last, from having learnt by 



KIDDYISM. 93 

rote the names, colours, and cognizances of all artists 
and pictures, past, present, and to come. He also 
has read, or pretends to have read, all the new novels 
from Waverley downwards. Howbeit, not having a 
poetical soul, he votes Southey and Wordsworth dry ; 
does not understand Byron ; and shakes his head at 
Tom Moore. While, on the other hand, he venerates 
Shakespeare so much that he never dances a quadrille 
without enquiring of his rosy partner, in a tripping on 
the tongue sort of voice, " Do you know Shakespeer ? — a 
fine fellow, eh, mem ? " and then, having taken breath, 
continues, in the words of some old critique, which he 
has treasured up for the purpose, and with which he has 
already bored the ears of some twenty dancing damsels 
before, — " In my poor opinion — hem ! — I beg pardon, 
mem, what were we talking about ? oh, apropos ! 
Shakespeer, mem, is considered a work of supereemi- 
nent genees, combined with high leeterary attain- 
ments ! " 

A Kiddy is in his highest glory from twenty to 
thirty, when his sun begins to decline in the horizon 
of notoriety. Being of the ephemeral tribe, he seldom 
lives long, but mostly terminates his gay and useless 
existence in a few years after he has been initiated into 
the mysteries of his profession. His death is generally 
occasioned by his being left out at a gala ball, or by 
seeing some other Kiddy with a hat, or dorsal garment, 
more scient than his own. 

The varieties of kiddies are very numerous ; among 
the primates are the " Clerical Kiddy/' " The Military 



94 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

Kiddy/' " The Literary Kiddy/' and the " Solemn 
Kiddy." 

The "Clerical Kiddy " is, perhaps, the most savage of 
all the species ; for he boxes, he hunts, he fleeces his 
creditors, and gets drunk every day and night of his 
life. On a Sunday, incarcerating his neck in a white 
durance, and daubing his face with rouge till his cheeks 
glow like the Jewish lawgiver's, when he descended 
from the Mount, he assumes the popular preacher, 
and holds forth to a fashionable audience, with one of 
Porteus's elegantly rhythmed sermons, which he, sans 
ceremonie, and blushless, delivers as his own. When 
he has finished, he walks through the midst of his 
hearers enjoying their plaudits, and at the church door 
cavalierly gives his arm to the best looking lady of his 
acquaintance among his fashionable flock. 

In his general habits, " the Military Kiddy " is the 
very antipodes to the preceding one ; he is the most 
mild, the most inoffensive, and the most gentle of all 
bipeds. Though " bearded like the pard," and ar- 
ranged in all the pride and circumstance of gold ribbed 
tights, brass tipped Wellingtons, and white leather 
gauntlets, he is pugnacious and barbarous only in ap- 
pearance. What most distinguishes the " Military 
Kiddy " from the rest of his species is, that he is not 
stationary ; but, like the swallow, a bird of passage. 
In the genial months of summer, he may be seen with 
others of his vocation, congregating in the streets of 
London and Paris ; from whence, as soon as his mus- 
tachios begin to change colour and fall off, having 



KIDDYISM. 95 

shaved, which generally happens about the beginning 
of October, he migrates into the country for the ex- 
press purpose, as it would seem, of fostering the infant 
plantations on his chin, and of coaxing the young hairs 
into the growth of life by the frequent application of 
an oily concrescence, 'ycleped " Bear's Grease." Thus, 
when he hath succeeded in giving to his " hairy 
nothings a local habitation and a name," rejoicing in his 
renewed gallant appearance, he wings his flight to his 
old haunts, Regent-street and the Parks, there roman- 
cing, until a like emergency calls him into the country 
again. 

Spindle-shanked, tripe-visaged, mouth-puckered, self- 
inflated, and possessing small, mean eyes, beaming forth 
insufferable conceit, no animal is held in greater detes- 
tation and disgust than the " Literary Kiddy." His 
head, too, is so diminutive, so " Jerry Sneak " like, 
that it hath been a matter of dispute whether it con- 
tain any brains ; and some, indeed, have amused them- 
selves (though it is very cruel !) in cleaving open his 
skull to satisfy themselves of the doubt. The investi- 
gation, I believe, has mostly been unattended with 
success. 

The covering of this latter species of the animal is 
destitute of the beauty and variety of the rest of his 
tribe ; being mostly a seedy great coat, which is worn 
all the year round, a mouse-coloured castor, and white 
leggings. His hands gloveless, and immersed in his 
side pockets. Cruel and destructive, in an excessive 
degree, he oftentimes (unless attentively watched) 



96 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

commits dreadful ravages among the modern poets; 
invading the library, putting the Dominie to flight and 
carrying off much valuable plunder to his back parlour 
home; where he begins his horrid orgies, by first inflating 
himself with a liquor 'ycleped green tea, and then 
slaughters, with indiscriminate barbarity, Byron, Scott, 
and Moore, compressing their noblest and strongest 
members into slender anatomies of his own, viz. 
" Stanzas on Dreams," "Hope," "Love;" and lines 
inscribed in a Lady's Album to " Anna," " Rosabella," 
or " Matilda." 

When he has got some of this " stuff" inserted, by 
toddying the printer's devil (at the hazard of his being 
discarded by his superior Lucifer, the Editor !) he 
hurries off to the houses of all his acquaintance, and 
lauds the same " stuff" until he has created an interest 
in the minds of his auditors : then, he modestly avows 
the authorship with the injunction not to tell. And 
while, before an hour has fleeted to its parent Annus, 
he himself discloses it to every man, woman, and child 
he meets ! Having thus concocted a few wretched 
tyrolets, he assumes the poet, affects to roll his eye 
" in a fine frenzy," and has his portrait cut out in 
black paper, for the first edition, in twelves, of his 
works ; so sure is he (in his own conceit) of Don Juan- 
ing it in after years ! 

His soul delights that his body should stand under a 
ruined arch, with its arms folded as a Byron. He 
useth to mumble to himself in the streets, that he may 
appear to be under the influence of inspiration. A 



KIDDYISM. 97 

close copyist of the bard of Newstead, he laments the 
captivity of Greece, and hints, that through his exer- 
tions she may yet be free ! Having read in " Moore's 
Notices " that Byron looked spiritualized and delicate, 
he immediately puts himself under a course of medi- 
cine, drinks vinegar and water, discards rouge from his 
toilet, and uses nothing but " Rowland's Kalydor." So 
much for the " Literary Kiddy \" 

The " Solemn Kiddy " is a " garqon" who has tried 
all the preceding forms, but not gaining the due pro- 
ficiency, determines to carve out an immortality for 
himself ; and so becomes a " Solemn Kiddy." 

Not being, like the rest of his class, gregarious, he 
stalks alone through the streets, with " Burton's Ana- 
tomy of Melancholy" in his hand. His apathetic 
figure, clad in sables, forming a tout-ensemble not un- 
]ike " his grandfather cut in alabaster ! " A smile never 
plays upon his lips, for he sees Matthews " at home," 
and reads " Don Quixote," without putting his risibility 
to the expense of one single cachinnation. Abomi- 
nating a pun, he considers the creators of them as 
offenders too dangerous to be left at large among 
civilized society, and often seeks to confound the in- 
corrigible punster, by mouthing the severity of Johnson, 
to the purport that he " who cracks puns, would not 
refuse to lighten pockets." A constant attendant at 
funerals, he follows the pall, in appearance — 

" so faint, so spiritless, 

So dull, so dead in look, so woe begone," 

F 



98 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

that most of the spectators believe him to be the chief 
mourner, and this hallucination is carried so far, that 
he has been known to have the undertaker's bill sent 
for his inspection and settlement ! 

Kiddies, like other incorporated bodies, have certain 
laws and regulations by which their words and actions 
are governed, and which are as immutable and as in- 
exorable as the olden statutes of the Medes and Per- 
sians. 

A selection from their code may not be without its 
utility to those who are about to become candidates 
for the vestmental honours of Les Modes, and who 
esteem Brummell, of neckcloth-tying-celebrity, as the 
beau ideal of what a man ought to be. The following, 
therefore, are some extracts from the Vade-mecum of 
an eminent Kiddy * lately deceased, and now first given 
to the public. 

" BRUMMELLIANA." 

1. Let notoriety be your leading principle. When 
the weather is cold and snow falls be sure to don your 
lightest habiliments, viz , white gloves, pumps, and 
yellow-lined leghorn. But in the dog days, envelope 
yourself in a four-caped box coat, a worsted comfortable 
round your neck, and over-shoes : — this will not fail to 
bestow notoriety. 

2. For variety, one day perambulate the streets 

* The late George Brummell. 



KIDDYISM. 99 

uncombed, unwashed, unshaved, and marvellously 
ill-favoured. The next, having cast off your slough, 
appear in your most resplendent garniture, " like a 
mail'd angel on a battle day ! " — This is a very good idea. 

3. When you are on horseback keep a sharp look 
out, and if you are observed put your steed to its metal, 
so to witch the world with your noble horsemanship. 
But if you are without speculation take it easy ; for it 
is the acme, the very Mount Blanc, of folly to exert 
yourself when no laurels are to be gained. 

4. Fishing, shooting, and hunting, avoid, if possible ; 
for they are too robustious for the delicate constitution 
of a Kiddy, and, in fact, only calculated for majors in 
the army, and the cadets of aristocratic families. Yet, 
sometimes, you may venture out with your angle, 
always provided you're clad in ball-room harness. 

Nota Bene. — A Kiddy of my acquaintance once 
obtained in the country a week's popularity by fishing. 
For going to a river which meandered immediately 
under the public promenade, he waded up to his middle, 
and there stood, indifferent alike to the sport and the 
chill, as he was conscious of being the " observed of all 
observers," and that his fine contour, harmonizing with 
the surrounding scenery, formed a beautiful coup d'ceil, 
which must needs captivate the attention of the fair 
peripatetics on the walks above. 

5. Neglect not to publish yourself at all public 
places, — theatres, concerts, exhibitions, &c, for much 
stray popularity may. be gained at them, and every 
little adds. And, also, be sure you attend on a Sunday 

f 2 



100 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

every church, chapel, and meeting house; for there 
you will be certain to shine. 

Never shew the least outward astonishment at any 
thing ; for nothing is more decidedly low. If a coach 
is overturned, and some three or four killed, or maimed, 
insert a genuine Havannah in the corner of your 
mouth, and with a simpering nonchalance, enquire 
"What is the row?" When told, swing yourself 
round on your Wellington, and, widely gaping, exclaim, 
" Is that all \" This succeeds, a merveille with the gens 
de peu. 

7. If you should see a man in imminent danger of 
being drowned — " Longe fuge ! " — and by no means 
attempt to rescue him, although " c'est fait de lui;" 
for the water would grievously de'range your admirably 
adjusted attire ; and, entre nous, it is better for the 
man to sink, than for you to commit a solecism on your 
new alamodes ; and mutatis mutandis, were you even to 
be in peril by water, don't, as you love your profession, 
try to save yourself until after having adjusted your 
perfumed locks, and reconnoitred your neckcloth so 
that it still maintains its graceful tie ; for, were you to 
be extricated, previously to settling these preliminaries, 
you would have to pass through the streets with your 
lawn-breasted shirt completely bereft of its plaits. In- 
deed, on mature consideration, it is more creditable to 
die thus, a la Spartan, than to be seen in such an un- 
kiddy-like predicament ! 

8. Never permit the doux yeux, or tender glances, 
of any damsel to transport you too far — but always 



K1DDYISM. 



101 



remember that a kiddy is not a marrying man — there- 
fore love wisely, and not too well ! 

9. Among strangers, you should sport in appearance 
the perfect rake, so that they may say you are a 
devil of a fellow, and abound in " dulcibus vitiis." It 
may be brought about in this wise : — " The other even- 
ing dined with my friend, Sar Freezle Waspwaist — a 
•hospitable fellar, Freezle. The company consisted of 

, and some animals in gaiters, whom did not know, 

'pon honour ! After dinnar, Sar Freezle said to me, 
Slender, my dear fellar, a pipe of Lacryma Christi, 
to a pipe of vin du pays, you and I will floor the 
rest of the company. The challenge was accepted, 
and in two hours, may I be cusfd with a bottle 
of adulterated Macassar ! if all the men were not 
hors de combat, and extended en masse, like my 
grandfather's ttte, he ! he ! he ! while Sar Freezle and 
and your humble sarvant, demmee ! were as fresh as a 
pot of De la Croix's Almond Paste ! " And your gal- 
lantry may be established thus : — take out your per- 
fumer's unpaid bill, kiss it, and exclaim, in a Romeo- 
like intonation voice, " Ah ! la perdue Isabelle ! I loved 
you once ! " and then, as if you had been taken a Vim- 
proviste, scramble the letter into your pocket, and rush 

out of the room, with " Geenteelmen, you'll excuse me, 
I & c> ***** 

11. Be very particular in your mots d'usage, or oaths, 
for nothing exhibits the perfect Kiddy to more advan- 
tage than a tasteful choice of maledictions. The most 
approved and unique method of swearing is to impre- 



102 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

cate by some fashionable article of the toilet ; but if 
your genius is sufficiently refulgent to invent novel 
ones, tant mieux, use them by all means. Nevertheless, 
you may occasionnally patronize the d — mns, provided 
you use them " few and far between/' as they have cer- 
tainly had their share of popularity. * # 
****** 

Lastly, let the Garqon, who is about to set up as 
Kiddy on his own account, take the advice of one who 
(vanity apart) was no mean Kiddy in his day ! Instead 
of using the " ses triplex " of Horatius Flaccus for his 
breast, let him transfer it to his face, as a Kiddy should 
not be bashful, for if he is ; — 

u Farewell the boutique, and farewell the bal ! 

, Farewell the pave ; and all quality, 
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious ton, 
Farewell ! — The Kiddy's occupation's gone." 



ON NATURAL DEFORMITY. 



" Deformity is daring, 
In its essence, to o'ertake mankind ! " 

Byron's " Deformed Transformed." 

Nature seems to have forgotten love and affection, 
those beautiful attributes of a mother, in her capricious 
dislike to some of her offspring, and in her superabun- 
dant kindness to others ; for on some she seals the im- 
press of loveliness and beauty, — framing their limbs 
elastic, strong, yet graceful, like some tall pine of Nor- 
way, which undulates to the breeze, and witches the 
blast with its elegant obeisance ; while on others she 
stamps ugliness, shrinking their members to half their 
rightful proportions, and placing in their countenances 
the ape deformity, that it may seem to grimace their 
bodies. 

Having thus created, according to the wild melody 
of our greatest poet, beings — 

° Deform' d, unfinished, sent before their time 
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up, 
And that so lamely, and unfashionable, 
That dogs bark at them," * — 

* Richard III. 



104 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

any reasonable person would conclude, that she 
would here halt. But it is not so : — she carries 
her rancour still further — and excites her beautiful 
pieces of clay, (who, by token, want very little excite- 
ment, being fully competent even to improve upon 
her lesson) to worry, satirize, and finally drive mad, 
these unfortunate and unoffending objects of her 
dislike. 

In vain the victims, writhing with torture, tell their 
heartless persecutors that they " cannot help it," they 
" were born so \" — in vain, gurgles down their cheeks 
the scalding tear — in vain, is their man-of-Uz-like en- 
durance of the scoff. Their tormentors cease not — 
but still exercise their cruel trade, which may not 
unaptly be termed that of assassins of the heart ! And 
even, should these denounced beings possess, secreted 
in the ungainly casket of their bodies, some fair, costly 
jewel, viz. a heart, good, benevolent, and pure, like a 
mountain streamlet which dances with impetuosity 
over the gravel soil — and a mind, which finds in every 
little pebble stone, that others tread thoughtlessly under 
foot, a pleasing moral, and in every modest field 
flower alternate sweet and bitter thoughts, — it abates 
not their persecutions ! For, the plurality that in- 
habit this world of ours, Pharisee -like, only appre- 
ciate the exterior of the salver, — "What's Hecuba" 
to them ? They consider genius, learning, and taste, 
only as the visionary houris of a diseased and sickly 
fancy. 

Did those who are surrounded with pleasures, too 



ON NATURAL DEFORMITY. 105 

piquantly exquisite to last, and who derive divertise- 
ment from the natural misfortunes of others, — did 
they know the bitter sensations of degradation they ex- 
cite by their ill-judged raillery, they would refrain : — for 
the credit of poor humanity, at least, let us hope they 
would. For callous and brutal indeed must that one 
be who would, when he was certified of the isolated 
and unhappy life of these exclusive beings, add one 
drop of gall to their chalice, already overflowing. And 
in proof that it is so, let the gay and thoughtless review 
the life of a deformed man, particularly those passages, 
which in the existence of others are so bright and joy- 
ous, — and they will find it an aching chasm. The fol- 
lowing may serve to exemplify some of the miseries 
these lepers of society endure. 

Look at a deformed man in the public streets ! with 
what painful calculation he selects the side less fre- 
quented, and walks an alien in his natal place, with 
his head compressed on his bosom, like a spring flower 
whose stem has been by some mischievous schoolboy 
prematurely severed ! He no sooner appears, than 
looks of intelligence are exchanged across the street, 
which are quickly succeeded by the directed point 
of the finger, the annoying steadfast stare, the broad 
grin of insult, and the rude exclamation of deri- 
sion ; while some jostle and elbow him with evi- 
dent tokens of incivility; others appear to whisper 
words of contempt with a haughty and careless indif- 
ference, whether he hears them or not. In addition to 
these veritable insults, being an approved " Heautonti- 
f 3 



106 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

morumenos," # he fancies others. So every smile that 
plays, like a sunbeam, on the lips of beauty he thinks is 
caused by his disparity ; every window that he passes 
forces the tear to conglomerate in his eye, for it reminds 
him of his misfortune ! Trembling, lest he should 
provoke insult, he recedes out of his path to the lowest 
of the " profanum vulgus," and when he sees some 
urchins advancing, who formerly insulted him, ashy pale, 
he turns back from where he was going, and hurries, in 
extreme wretchedness, to his lonely home ! 

Behold one in a party, or public place of resort, — 
those temples which are constituted to bestow felicity ! — 
He enters the room like one who follows to the deep 
pit-hole his only son — his " beautiful and brave ! " — 
the last of his name and race. He bows not, he smiles 
not ; his first impulse being to reconnoitre for a chair ; 
cheating his poor heart by believing that his deformities 
are less obvious in a sedentary position. Then, when 
seated, fearful of beholding disgust or laughing mockery, 
in the eyes of the company, occasioned by his un-ea?- 
quisite debut, he rivets his organs on the floor, and so 
makes many enemies by not bestowing the customary 
and fashionable number of " words, becks, and wreathed 
smiles." The seat that he first occupied, he stirs not 
from the whole evening, but there sits, as much alone, 
as if in some manless solitude ; wrapped up in an apa- 
thetic reverie, apparently unconscious of the gay, laugh- 

* " Heautontimorumenos," or " the Self Tormentor," the name 
of one of Terence's plays. 



ON NATURAL DEFORMITY. 107 

ing faces that flirt around him. Haunted by the horrid 
spectre, a sense of his deformity, he heeds not the song 
of the Syren, let her discourse ever such eloquent 
euphony — he applauds not when she has finished, 
though his, perhaps, was the only soul that legitimately 
felt her silver strains. He joins not the fantastic 
quadrille, nor does he bestow the tribute of admiration 
on those who swim down the varied maze in graceful 
undulation, like 

" The dancing spray, 
When from its stem the small birds wing away.",* 

When he departs, he retrogrades like a crab, sedu- 
lously guarding with his flame-like eyes his body from 
ridicule. On his passage to the door, he takes leave 
of nobody ; no one bids him stay ; but he exits, moan- 
ing and melancholy, like the fabled spirit of the storm 
before one of Nature's convulsions ! 

Behold one at home ; the sanctum where man, if 
worried and insulted outside, generally finds solace and 
quietude : but it is not so with the deformed. He has 
no kindred ear into which to pour his wrongs and suf- 
ferings ; — no soft bosom to pillow his head when sick ; 
— no kind smile to illume his steril track ; — and no 
small hand to take the weapon of death from his grasp, 
when sickened with an existence made intolerable by 
the world's neglect, he meditates to end at the same 
time his life and degradation. For what woman would 

* Lalla Rookh. 



108 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

extend her complaisance so far as to become the wife 
of one so lost and wretched ? So, in consequence, he 
has no " parvus Astyanax" to play in his hall, or " climb 
his knee, the envied kiss to share." But he is a being 
different and alone in the world ; seeking rest and find- 
ing none ; left at the mercy of interested domestics, 
who, well knowing his acute perception of disrespect, 
for amusement, make grimaces behind his chair ; while, 
to complete his unhappiness, myriads of squalling brats, 
not having the fear of coercion before their eyes, shout 
under his window the offensive term " my Lord," and 
sketch with chalk his similitude (by no means in little) 
on his very door ! 

Finally, take the last scene of one of these spitefully 
used beings, to whom " the world is not a friend, nor 
the world's law." Lo ! through the scant casement of 
that lonely cot, which is seated on a barren furzed 
heath, protected from the blast by no umbrageous shel- 
ter, glimmers one sickly light. — Enter there, ye chil- 
dren of Mockery ! the soul of one is about to avolate 
to those empyrean seats of bliss, where the sneer and 
point shall never vex him more. Not for him was the 
pouting lip of loveliness, or the lively maze, — the fes- 
tive board, — the champing steed, — the trumpet with a 
silver sound, — the pride, pomp, and circumstance, that 
gilds existence ; — his life was one page of bankruptcy, 
and his death But, soft ! see how nervously con- 
scious of ridicule he is to the very last. He employs 
no doctor, through the dread of exposing his deformities, 
and admits no minister to whisper peace to his mangled 



ON NATURAL DEFORMITY. 109 

soul, as he thinks it will be of no avail — that the King of 
the blue sky above will not receive such a vile thing as 

him among his bright ethereal courtiers ! 

******* 

Now a livid shade has passed over his countenance — 
there is a change, and he begins to suspirate with more 
difficulty. Oh ! how he longs to shake off this mortal 
coil, and quit a world which has used him most cruelly, 
and worse than it does its very dogs ! But, poor crea- 
ture ! he cannot die, for there is a cat in the chamber, 
and he is afraid the dumb animal will witness his de- 
formity, made more hideous by the agonies of Death. 
He essays his exhausted vigour to hurl the pillow at 
his feline observer, but the linen missile falls unflung 
from his nervous grasp. Ah ! he hath thought of an 
expedient to exclude the cat from beholding his dis- 
embodyment ; — see ! he pushes the end of the sheet 
with his foot towards the taper, but it does not reach 
it, — another violent effort of the body, and the linen 
ignites. A hectic of satisfaction flits across his shadowy 
visage as he dimly beholds that the flames, which flicker 
in spiral columns to the ceiling, are sufficient to screen 
him. And hark ! that horrid laugh, ha ! ha ! ha I it 
makes the flesh creep : — puss cannot see him now. — 
The gaping world will behold nothing more of him but 
a tumulus of black dust. He now dies in peace ! yet 
his once persecuted spirit must hover, like a kite on 
poised pinions, till its tall tenement is all consumed, 
before it wings its flight to the realms of beatitude ! 



ON THE DECLINE OF HEART 
BREAKING IN ENGLAND, 

WITH A HINT FOR ITS RESUSCITATION. 



In these days of universal enlightenment, when 
every department of art is making rapid strides towards 
the goal of amelioration, it is melancholy to consider 
that the most beautiful and sentimental of sciences, id 
est — " of Heart Breaking," instead of progressing, as 
might have been expected, from the well known sensi- 
tiveness of the female disposition, is virtually on the 
retrograde and decline. Indeed, so rarely does a scien- 
tific instance of this occur in these degenerate days, 
that the only symptom to point out its existence on this 
sublunary sphere, is, when the heart of some romantic 
grisette, while reading the " Sorrows of Werter " in the 
attic, 

indignant breaks, 
To shew that still it lives. 

To cause a reaction in the tastes of our fair country- 
women, many a modern author has quoted Shakes- 



DECLINE OF HEART BREAKING IN ENGLAND. Ill 

peare's " She never told her love," &c. in defence of 
this neglected system ; and many a Washington Irving 
has melodized his " Broken Heart " in exemplification 
of its beauties. But, alas ! their laudable endeavours 
have hitherto been uncrowned with success. For the 
" Infelix Dido " of this age, when forsaken by her gal- 
lant gay admirer, instead of retiring, willow in hand, as 
of yore, to some unfrequented spot in forest, or by 
stream to weep away her plumpness, " small by degrees, 
and beautifully less," now has recourse to the unsenti- 
mental expedient of flying, heart whole, into the arms 
of Death, via laudanum — cord — or the Serpentine 
river ; or, more unsentimental still, she lives on, and 
makes herself vulgarly happy. O Tempora ! O Ladies ! ! 

To counteract these prevailing abuses, and to induce 
young ladies to arrive at a consummation more devoutly 
to be wished for, various have been the theories started 
by philosophers and others ; but which, when called 
into requisition practically, have, as experience has 
verified, each and all, on account of their deleterious 
principles, been discontinued in disgust by the unhappy 
sufferer. 

Thus, by the awkward bungling and wretched treat- 
ment of the subject, many a feeling example, replete 
with intense interest and vivid portraiture, — calculated, 
in the hands of the poet, or novelist, 

"To point a moral, and adorn a tale," — 

has been lost for ever to the circulating libraries, and 
the world ! all because the web of the mind of those 



112 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

who audaciously undertook the subject, was not spun 
fine enough to encompass a science requiring the most 
delicate and fastidious handling. In a word, putting 
these failures out of the question (for they can be 
called nothing else), there never has yet been disco- 
vered a tangible cause calculated to produce the desired 
effect. 

To remedy, in some measure, this defect, so glaringly 
conspicuous in our domestic code, and the existence of 
which has been from time to time observed and repre- 
hended by foreigners, (for it is a well known fact, that 
though we possess a hundred different methods of break- 
ing heads, bones, banks, houses, venison, horses, &c, we 
have not one of sufficient note for breaking hearts), 
the author, his bosom heaving with pity and patriotism 
for the ladies and his country, has, at the expendi- 
ture of much valuable time and study, at last suc- 
ceeded in discovering a succedaneum, whose sim- 
plicity and cheapness, (for hitherto heart -breakage has 
been the exclusive privilege of the higher ranks, the 
respectable young woman of a lower class being de- 
prived of this desirable advantage), may put it in the 
power of all her Majesty's female lieges to enjoy this 
formerly exclusive advantage. 

Here the " Auctor " wishes it to be understood that 
it was his original intention to have deferred the pub- 
lication of his valuable recipe until some future period, 
when a renovation in the tastes of the age from break- 
ing heads to hearts, might have enabled the public 
more fully to appreciate its merits than they are likely 



DECLINE OF HEART BREAKING IN ENGLAND. 113 

to do at present, from which intention, however, at the 
pressing instances of many young ladies, whose commu- 
nications on the subject have been duly received, he 
has been induced to swerve. Indeed, so numerous 
have lately been these communications, " begging him 
to impart the fruits of his experience to the world/' 
that he has been obliged to employ two men daily to 
shovel away the billets like snow from his back pre- 
mises, where, for the better preservation of his person 
from a second edition in Bath and foolscap of the 
death of Pliny, they were deposited : for at one time, 
such was their alarming increscence, that the scullery - 
maid was actually prevented from pursuing her usual 
avocations, tending to the enfranchisement of grease in 
the wash-house! 

Previous to this incomparable discovery now being 
made public, its efficacy to promote the desired effect 
has been sufficiently essayed, as it has been employed 
in private practice, in upwards of one hundred cases, 
some of them the most hard and inveterate, and in no 
instance, (save one, and that one a jolly compound of 
fat, forty, and cherry bounce) has it been known to 
fail, or produce those unpleasant symptoms, so often 
experienced by young ladies, who, relying on the pro- 
testations of their respective (not respectable) adorers, 
neglect to consult a regular proficient. And so simple, 
yet speedy, is its process, that any lady — even the most 
delicate — may take it without the least hesitation or 
alarm, as it generally performs what is required of it, 
in two or three days at furthest. 



114 



HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 



In addition to its many advantages, peculiar to it 
alone, all young ladies, taking this prescription, will 
receive, gratis, after their decease, to be delivered to 
their executors, an epitaph, or monody, guaranteed not 
to fall short of one hundred lines ; to be written in six 
and eight, and to contain the customary compliment 
of the substantives — blight, canker, bankruptcy ; and 
the adjectives— early, premature, ill starred, &c, &c, 
together with other fanciful allusions, most musical, 
most melancholy. 



A RECIPE FOR BREAKING HEARTS. 



[Concocted expressly for the ladies; shewing how to rupture, on an 
entire novel principle, simply and scientifically, that most noble 
part of the human frame, without the slightest pain or inconve- 
nience to the owner : and equally performing its functions on the 
hardest, as well as the softest hearts. Prepared, after the original 
prescription, and under the immediate directions of the celebrated 
Dr. , who has made the Cordial parts particularly his study.] 



Having made up your mind to perpetrate Heart- 
ruptcy, after mature consideration of the consequences 
thereunto pertaining — viz. the entire annihilation of 
the vital principle, and the total drying up of the gas- 
tric fluids, — the first thing to be done is to commence 
a run upon your sympathies, so as to get yourself in a 
melancholy trim, preparatory to undergoing the course 
prescribed by the recipe. Now nothing is so likely to 
produce this effect in woman as drawing drafts on her 



DECLINE OF HEART BREAKING IN ENGLAND. 115 

sexual vanity ; to obtain this end, the ways and means 
are various ; such as, for instance, (when fashion ful- 
minates the contrary) wearing the petticoats long and 
trailing, to conceal the ankles — sporting a shocking bad 
bonnet, calculated to disfigure the profile — staining the 
hands by squeezing black currants for jelly, and then 
cauterising them with quick lime, &c, &c. 

But these, although recommended by some prac- 
titioners, as they tend to make the bosom callous, are 
highly pernicious, and should not be resorted to, except in 
cases of extreme hardness, lest by their astringent qua- 
lities they render altogether ineffectual the means after- 
wards pursued to expedite the Breakage. 

There is one, however, which is not liable to this 
objection, it is to offer, like the Grecian women of old, 
your hair at the tomb of your vanity, or, in other 
words, to dock, or cut off with a tailor's shears, stand- 
ing ten inches in the sheath, those locks, which St. 
Paul declares to be a glory to your sex ; and when your 
head is like a Welsh field in stubble time, view your- 
self in your glass, and if that does not cause a determi- 
nation of sadness to your breast bone, as indubitably it 
will, to assist its operating, half-a-dozen female friends, 
by way of stimulatives, may be called in requisition, 
who, by timely making you amenable to the game laws, 
will not fail to promote the end you have in view. 
Before we proceed any further in these affairs of the 
Heart, it will not be amiss to caution the patient, that 
the creating an artificial sadness, as a preparatory step, 
will not be necessary for any but the scientific amateur. 



116 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

For the young lady who has sung to the tune of " Jessy 
on a bank was sleeping," with an inamorato, whose 
affection for her partook of any thing but of the nature 
of the " Loves of the Angels," and who has since for- 
saken her, will not require any provocative to sorrow, 
as, besides her situation, the daily hearing of the street 
organ warbling the tune he used to sing her, together 
with the sight of the 



rings, gauds, conceits, 



Knacks, trifles, nosegays, sweetmeats," 

with which he stole the impression of her fancy, will 
be of themselves sufficient without the foreign aid of 
assistance. 

Indeed some have opined that even in the case of 
amateurs, sorrow is superfluous as a probationary mea- 
sure, and would fly at once to the recipe without any 
antecedent precaution. While a few empirics, who 
have lately sprung up, go even further, and deny the 
utility of grief in diseases of the heart altogether, and 
stand up for that species of breakage when the heart 
bursts smilingly ; grounding their tenets on the opinions 
of two modern writers on the subject, who tell you that 

" The cheek may be ting'd with a warm sunny smile, 
Though the cold heart to ruin runs darkly the while." 

And that thought — 

" Pleasure fires the maddening soul, 
The Heart— the Heart is lonely still ! " 



DECLINE OF HEART BREAKING IN ENGLAND. 117 

But they forget that there is a villainous inconstancy 
about a female ; that should her outward appearance be 
gay, her heart, although really inclined to fusibility, 
would soon borrow its complexion. But onwards : — 
when two or three days ruminating on the loss of your 
hair hath created a load on your bosom, equivalent to a 
day-mare, and when your spirits have sunk to that 
state, technically called low, you may safely begin to 
use the directions here set down for you ; the first of 
which, is to choose a day for the experiment, and, as 
their subsequent success greatly depends upon this, 
care should be taken to pick out one of those gaudy 
sunny days when beaux and butterflies in their respective 
pontificalibuses are romancing up and down under your 
window, and when all nature glitters like the gilt robe 
of a gingerbread potentate, in an emporium of pastry. 
It would also add much to the happy termination of 
the affair, if some goldfinches and larks could be at- 
tracted to your casement, as what says Burns, — 

" Thou'll break my hearty thou bonnie bird, 
That sings upon the bough." 

And as a few crumbs, duly scattered, may procure them, 
no one need be deprived of this advantage ; and in ad- 
dition to all this, should the races, or • assizes,' fall 
upon the day of your choice, it will be doubly auspi- 
cious, as the sense of being debarred of sharing in these 
attractions, operating together with other causes, will 
force the hypochondriac humour to flow faster than the 



118 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

heart can bear, always supposing that heart to be of any 
reasonable softness, and, if allowed to have fair play, 
may promote a fissure in that organ ; indeed, the most 
speedy conclusion may be prognosticated from its un- 
controlled agency, instances having occurred when this 
one ingredient of itself has been adequate, without put- 
ting the patient to the trouble of proceeding further in 
his application of other nostrums ; but these, of course, 
are rare, as hearts differ materially in different subjects. 

Here, it will be necessary to observe, that while under 
a course of cordials, all excitement, such as reading, 
playing, drawing, &c. should be sedulously avoided ; 
indeed, the interval between breakfast and dinner must 
be passed strictly sabbatically, the only relaxation that 
can be allowed with safety, is, to gnaw your nails, and 
bite your lips, which may be varied at discretion, by 
administering to yourself from time to time small doses 
of the decoction of tantalization, that is, having all the 
most piquant novels and newest songs in your boudoir, 
without daring to open, or play one of them. 

But now to get into " medias res : " — When dinner 
is announced, draw your chair a pretty lady-like dis- 
tance from the table, or centre of gravy, to the fire, 
which ought, par consequence, to be made up for the 
occasion ; — the mean warmth, two degrees above blood 
heat. Having placed your feet on the fender, and so 
attitudised yourself as to be enabled to inspect every 
particular mouthful that passes down the oesophagus 
of the feeders, the observance of this, should the 
parties in question munch with gout, will materially 



DECLINE OF HEART BREAKING IN ENGLAND. 119 

assist in bringing about the climax. Though, observe, 
little reliance can be placed upon it, unless the viands 
are of a strong, unctious savour, and calculated to tickle 
the gums. The dishes most in request for this pur- 
pose, and approved of by the faculty, are roast beef — 
goose — and plum-pudding. 

As this is the most critical part of the process ; — all 
depending upon the patient's abstinence : — beware ! — 
touch not — taste not — handle not — but let him who 
plays the part of " Dr. Pedro, Positive, De Bodewell, 
native of a place called Snatchaway," * remove the cates, 
guiltless of your fork. For there is an astringent 
quality about meat, which binds the heart to existence ; 
— in a word, it is the bones of the prophet, which 
maketh to live ! Take heed, therefore, lest any officious 
hand offers you a condiment ; for if you receive it, — be 
it the veriest morsel — as in the case of Proserpine of 
old, — the charm is broken — the book is buried. 

When you have imbibed a quantum suff. of the cor- 
rosive sublimate of the clatter of knives and forks, 
" you may/' the recipe proceeds to say, " stare at the 
fire," after the method a good catholic may be supposed 
to regard his peck of purgatorial coals previous to their 
being heaped upon him. This speculation may not in 
safety be continued after your eyes begin to explode 
from their sockets, like the optics of those most abused 
of God's people, herrings, while undergoing the disci- 
pline of the frying-pan. 

* Vide Don Quixote. 



120 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

The next step in reversion, is, ' the sigh,' which 
ought to be two hundred lover power. It may be per- 
formed in this wise — dilate the muscle of your chest 
for the space of one calender minute, so as to enable 
the suspiratory organs to give volume to the " heigho !" 
This done, open your mouth, (if you have one) at the 
right angles, and keeping it on a half cock, or equinox, 
deliberately discharge your sigh, — which ought to be, if 
a good one, long and deep, such as with which the first 
Lord of the Treasury apostrophises the loaves and 
fishes prior to his going out of office — 

" Must I then leave thee, Paradise ? " 

Note : should the patient be incapacitated from 
natural causes, to generate a connected " Heigho !" — 
she may join many small ones together, by keeping up 
a sort of breathing hyphen. But onwards : — having 
brought your sigh to bear, it should incontinently be 
followed up by a discharge of crying — gradually begin- 
ning from the passive whine, to the active tear, and 
so on, to the downright bellow, when the tears are 
sharp, acrid, and salty, capable of pickling any neat's 
tongue in Humandom. 

Should it so happen that you find a difficulty in the 
brewage of your tears, and that they do not come kind, 
you must follow the manner of heirs and husbands, and 
other fortunate dogs, who, out of common decency, are 
obliged to look sad — i. e. have recourse to an onion, 
which will not fail (" deo favente ") to dislodge the 



DECLINE OF HEART BREAKING IN ENGLAND. 121 

secretion. Always minding when they do flow, not to 
pick them up, but let your pearls, like those of the 
great Duke of Buckingham, fall unmolested about you. 
Nothing now of any consequence remains to be said ; 
except, that in conclusion, we would suggestyou do, 
by all means, go to bed and sleep on your weeping. 

Some authors are of opinion, and Shakespeare among 
the number, " that unkindness may do much !" — and 
if your friends could throw in a manipulus, or handful 
of this ingredient: — such, for instance, as sticking some 
dozen of Whitechapel needles in your sheets ; — or satu- 
rating them with spring water; — or better still, if they 
could contrive to turn you out of doors some frosty 
night to sleep, with only the sky for a counterpane : — 
these are but trifles,— but it is astonishing how much 
may be effected by them. 

Of course this recipe is to be repeated on each of 
the " glorious three days/' the space generally allowed 
for the breakage, (except when ordered to the contrary). 
At the end of which, symptoms of the " Facies Hippo- 
cratica" will make their appearance: viz. — the nostrils 
will become sharp — the eyes hollow — the temples low 
— the lips of the ears contracted — the forehead dry and 
wrinkled — and the whole complexion dry and livid. 
In a word, " you will be past praying for." 

Post scriptum : — To guard against counterfeits. 
The ladies are particularly requested to observe, that 
there are many unprincipled young men, who make it 
their business to plume on their simplicity spurious 
imitations of this invaluable recipe, which are in reality 

G 



122 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

only deleterious compositions of their own. To avoid 
any further attempts of this nature, which are alike in- 
j urious to the fair purchaser and the present proprietor, 
who has made this branch of science particularly his 
own, having devoted a long life to its attainment, — be 
it known, none can be genuine except they have the 

signature * *, and the place of his abode * *, 

attached to them. N.B; Testimonials of the first 
beauty and loveliness can be shewn in favour of the 
recipe's utility by the proprietor. Lovers and hus- 
bands supplied through the medium of their country 
agents. 



BLIGHT OF EARLY HOPES! 



" One fatal remembrance, one sorrow that throws 
Its bleak shade alike o'er our joys and our woes, 
To which life nothing darker or brighter can bring, 
For which joy has no balm, and affliction no sting !" 

T. Moore. 



When we see one, who, from being a virtuous man, 
all at once hurls himself down the giddy cataract of 
dissipation ; on whose lip, alike regardless of his fame 
and the crowing of the moral bird within him, the wild 
laugh is ever loudest ; — there is sure to be something 
wrong — but what is it ? 

When, too, we see hourly carried by us to dark- 
ness and the worm the fallen blossoms of youth and 
loveliness, who expired, to use the cant of the news- 
papers, without a groan ; — a casual indisposition — a 
slight cold — may be assigned by the attendant Leech as 
the cause of their departure : but the real cause ? — 
can you explain it? — can philosophers? Is their sudden 
disappearance natural think you ? seeing that the oak 
dieth not while yet a sapling, but endureth for a cen- 
tury, unless scathed by the thunder-stone ! 
g2 



124 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

And what makes the jest drown the harsh clank of 
the chains on the scaffold ? — The soldier mount the 
cannon' d breech and calmly take up the bursting shell 
and throw it from him ? — The ruined female accom- 
pany her march of infamy with the loud music of riot ? 
— And why is the rosy cheek " sicklied o'er with the 
pale cast of thought?" and the modest behaviour laid 
aside to put " an antic disposition on ? " — And why, 
too, do the lonely places re-echo to the report of the 
suicidal tube — and the midnight waters moan and 
shriek as they receive the plunge of agony? — And 
whence comes it of old that the feudal baron doffed his 
cloth of blue and gold for the cockle hat and staff? — 
And the daughter of a noble house forsook rank and 
splendour to chant " faint hymns to the cold fruitless 
moon ? " History also tells us of an undaunted Mutius 
thrusting his hand until consumed in the lurid pyre — 
of a self- sacrificed Curtius leaping into the forensic 
chasm — of a devoted Decius rushing on the spears of 
the enemy — and of a disinterested Regulus refusing to 
enter his native city. Why did they so ? The foolish 
Chroniclers of the time, full of the " dulce et deco- 
rum est pro patria. mori," will tell you it was patriotism : 
— think you it was so ? Had not the withering of a 
favourite flower — the seeing the " soul's joy " become 
" another's bride ! " something to do with it — in a word, 
was it not Blight of Early Hopes ? 

Blight of Early Hopes ! To think that those four 
words take away the happiness of a whole life ! Alas ! 
that their effect should be so ; — that it is so, is too cer- 



BLIGHT OF EARLY HOPES. 125 

tain ! To the worlding, these blasts of soul may appear 
a small matter — even unworthy consideration. " Time 
and change," he will tell you, " and the heart will 
again put forth its green leaf." Were this said of our 
flowers, he might be right ; for though they may sink 
beneath the canker worm, it is only for a season : 
wait awhile, and they will bloom again, as each suc- 
ceeding spring verifies. But with man, it is quite dif- 
ferent : — he has but one spring in which to sow his 
hopes — if that prove untoward, what is his history ? — a 
blank ! For then he has no home — no country — no 
green place in memory's clime — none in hope's — for 
the pleasures of neither are his. But the world is a 
desert, and in that desert he wanders like a moaning 
spectre, without star or compass, reckless of what may 
happen, to sigh over the bowl of happiness which lies 
stringless at his life's fountain ! To tempt him from 
his lonely dwelling place, many have been the means 
resorted to by the charmer : — the vivifying change of 
travel; — the trumpet call of ambition ; — the rosy Hirlas 
of pleasure. But he heeds them not. For 

" Where should Othello go?" 

And what are Ambition's boasted triumphs to him ? 
What Pleasure's maddening draught? He canno* 
pay the demands society has upon him even, much less 
those which it may require ; for his is an insolvency — 
a total breaking up of the heart. But should he rally, 
and in the endeavour to cheat his sorrows, listen to the 



126 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

overtures of the wily flatterer; — what is the con e- 
quence ? He runs across the blue waters and gazes 
upon the buildings, the beauties, the varieties of distant 
lands, and mixes in their societies, their pleasures, and 
their streets. But it is only to feel that, though he has 
changed his climate, his heart is the same withered 
thing it ever was ! 

Again he essays and worships fame, and the orders 
of many nations shine in brilliant mockery on his breast ; 
— and men speak loudly of his triumphs — his power — 
his wealth — and mayhap his beautiful wife and interest- 
ing children — and some may even envy him his 
equipage — his mansion — his sumptuous festivities. 
But can these give him back his early freshness ? Can 
they make him happy ? — No ; something whispers, they 
came too late ! He never can be the man he once was ! 




X 



THE ACTRESS. 



" She is a creature out of place — a fine, abused, glittering, wretched 
being— a thing produced like the fish at the Roman banquets, to de- 
light the unfeeling guest with its brilliancy and its agonies ! " 

" Woman; or pour et contre." 

" What, not seen Miss * * * ! " exclaimed the 

gay and volatile Mrs. Du Fresnoy, throwing as much 
amazement into her pretty countenance as its pretti- 
ness could reasonably bear. This was addressed to 
the handsome and eccentric Louis Willoughby, who 
had just before given a particular negative to a similar 
enquiry : — " No, I've not, indeed ! " replied he, meekly. 
— " Well! that is surprising!" — " But you intend to 
go ? — every one's going, you know." — " No, I don't, 
really;" said Willoughby, drily.—" No ! "—And the little 
lady regarded him with a mingled look of horror and 
admiration; — of horror, at his want of taste — of admi- 
ration, that he should, singly, stand forth, and dare to 
be different from every one else. — " But, perhaps," 
said she, after a pause, " perhaps, you are a metho- 
dist?" — " No, I have not that honour," returned he> 






128 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

smiling. " Then, will Monsieur of the rueful counte- 
nance disclose his sage reasons for not going to see 
' La Belle Actrice ?\ "—" Certainly, with the greatest 
pleasure." — " Come, begin: ' discuss unto me/ as An- 
cient Pistol says."—" I have two."—" Which be they?" 
continued she, with an air of mock gravity. — " In the 
first place — my exchequer." — And the handsome youth 
pointed to the pockets of a very distingue vest, which 
he wore, with a ludicrous assumption of indigence. 
" Ha! ha! you are a droll creature." — " And, secondly, 
I never eat barbacued pig, or crimpt salmon!"* — " In 
the name of all that is ridiculous ! what has barbacued 
pig and crimpt salmon, to do with seeing Miss 

* * * 2 » — „ p ar d onnes mo { . — every thing. — But 

you shall hear: — in a word, I never did and never will 
partake of a dish which owes its piquancy to the pro- 
tracted sufferings of the animal forming its contents; — 
neither will I lend myself to swell the number of those 
who derive amusement from the reckless seeming of 
one, whose brilliancy is but the writhing agony of the 



* " Barbacued pig, &c." — It has long been fashionable to entertain 
some amiable abhorrence, and to intrude that abhorrence as often as 
possible in company ; and so essential is this thought to a man's 
character, that many of our great heroes and authors have these 
dislikes gratuitously attributed to them by their biographers. — Thus, 
we are told, one man cannot bear a cat ; — a second faints at the 
sight of a mouse ; — a third sees hydrophobia and feather beds in a 
dog ; — while a fourth has a delicate horror of children I But it re- 
mained for Louis Willoughby to nourish an un-penchant for pigs, 
salmon, and pretty actresses. How many will agree with him in his 
taste, particularly as touching the latter, I leave to the discretion of 
my readers. 



THE ACTRESS. 129 

mullet, as it expires in the hands of the guest ! " — 
** Bravo ! — so you really compare the all -fascinating 
Miss * * *, — the envy of our sex — and the ad- 
miration of yours ; — whose smallest word is law ; — and 
whose slightest action, fashion — even to the shaking of 
her curls; — whose witcheries, many a rosy finger at this 
present moment is busily employed in the mysteries 
of the toilet — emulous, but hopeless to imitate ! — to 
what ? — to a poor, unintellectual mullet ! — At the same 
time insinuating, that she, while shrined by the ap- 
plause of a whole theatre, endures as great a mental 
pang, as the aforesaid mullet does a bodily one, while 
descending the aesophagus of some modern Helioga- 
balus ! " — " Well, you'll excuse me, but my good friend, 
I begin to ' suspect your ears ! ' ha ! ha ! ha ! " — " Your 
ladyship's very obliging," replied Willoughby, with an 
air of ill concealed pique. For no man, especially a 
young one, likes to be called an ass, though that de- 
signation should emanate from rosy lips ; and taking 
up his cane, he rose to depart. 

" Stay, Willoughby, you foolish creature, you're not 
going?" cried Mrs. Du Fresnoy, placing her lily finger, 
dight with jewels, on his arm. He dissented with a 
nod. " Ha ! I see how it is, you're offended ! — Well, 
I suppose I ought to apologize : — here Dante," and 
she pushed her canine favourite forward : "go and beg 
pardon for me of Mr. Willoughby. — There now, that's 
done : — and as I cannot excite your taste, I must try 
your sympathy: — The thing is this — my aunt and 
cousins have asked me to chaperon them to the theatre: 
g3 



130 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

— I could not well refuse; and you know what a bore 
it will be to me ; particularly, as you know my aunt is 
not very choice in her ' mots oV usage.' — Now, I wanted 
you — you cruel creature — to join our party, to prevent 
me from being altogether annihilated by the uncouth 
patois of my aunt and country cousins. — But you'll 
go ? " — and the fair applicant put herself in an attitude 
of entreaty. "lam very sorry, but — " " But, stuff, 
nonsense ! " — Still the youth was inexorable, and the 
lady (their usual way) pulled to pieces a fine mossy 
rose, in the prettiest pique imaginable. 

This conversation, to which I was an auditor, raised 
my curiosity, and though not much of what the world 
is pleased to call a ' play-goer/ (nevertheless, I had 
seen the gloworms of the day — the Siddons — the 
O'Neil — the Kean, &c.) I, that evening in question, 
perpetrated a visit to the temple of Thespis, and paid 
my three shillings and six-penny significant, the usual 
charge for a box of opium in the country theatre of 

. And here let me, en passant, advise all those 

who are in the habit of conjugating the verb to snore- 
in other words, of taking a siesta after dinner, not to 
do so on the afternoon they intend visiting a country 
theatre : as two naps of one evening are too much for 
the human frame, and highly prejudicial to any con- 
stitution, except that of a top, or the sleeping affair 
mentioned in the "book of wonders," (liber mirabilis ! ) 
who dozed — I quote from memory ; — from the twenty- 
third of one month, to the twenty- something of 
another inclusive ; and even then, on waking, " cry'd 



THE ACTRESS. 131 

to dream again/' and like Jack Cade, wished to " set a 
new nap" upon himself. 

Owing to business, it was late, almost half-price 
time, when I entered the theatre ; and as I turned, or 
rather endeavoured to turn into the " boxes," (for I 
could not, on account of the pressure from within, in- 
sinuate more than my head and shoulders, and one of 
my legs, and that obtained a footing in some one's hat!) 
the " drop scene " had that moment fallen, and the 

queen attraction of the night, Miss * * *, had just 

retired; the fourth act being over. — While to ease them- 
selves, and to catch the small modicum of air which 
an opening door, now and then, dealt out, all the 
audience had risen, plying their " play-bills " and pocket 
handkerchiefs, and from time to time giving vent to 
their admiration in such language as the following : — 
" What vivacity !" — " quite a treat! " — " equal to Ves- 
tris ! " — or as Pope says — 

" Each maid cry'd charming ! — each youth divine !" 

But to return to myself : — I had not long been in 
my half-in and half-out position, before my endeavours 
to evade the " liberty of the press" were recognised by 

the Du Fresnoy party ; particularly by Mrs. , the 

aunt, of whom honourable mention has before been 
made ; and who, either for my own sins, or those of my 
forefathers, called the whole attention of the " house " 

to me, by bawling out — " Here we are, Mr. , girls 

and all, frying like mutton chops on a gridiron ! " 



132 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

There was no standing this ; — even a ■ citizen king, 
or a popular candidate, would have shrunk from such 
notoriety : — so I backed out, (as they say in duels, when 
a man will not come to the ' scratch/) much to the 
delight of a cadaverous looking beau, in my rear, who 
had long been desiring my place ; and bent my steps 
towards the " pit," — which, by the bye, is far the most 
easy and convenient sitting in a modern theatre. For 
more decorous than the " gods," and not so callous 
as the " boxes," the inhabitants of the arena, or " pit," 
may be said to form the heart of the house; as 'tis 
from them, the pure and unsophisticated exhibitions of 
feeling ever have their rise. The above, and many 
other advantages, have made this part, for those who 
come to be amused, and not to amuse — to see, and not 
to be seen, — the pleasantest locality of the whole es- 
tablishment. To be sure, it has its drawbacks — and 
what has not ? For instance, the " throwing him 
over " ejection of a drunken sailor, &c. on one's brutus, 
is not very agreeable; — nor the showers of orange peel, 
&c. &c. very pleasant. But then, the first * moving 
accident ' may not happen the night you are present ; 
and as for the other fruition — coming as it does from 
the gods — the best thing a wise man can do is to bear 
it with patience and resignation. 

Here some persons may suppose, that I made this 
reflection in my passage from the " boxes " to the 
" pit." — Now I beg leave to assure those persons, if 
such persons there be, that I made no reflection at all, 
in that aforesaid passage of mine ; on the contrary, 



THE ACTRESS. 133 

my whole attention was engaged in counting the steps 
in the said passage, lest I should miss one in my de- 
scent, and by so doing, break my head, and satisfy the 
world concerning its contents ; of which, some have 
very unhandsomely presumed to doubt. But, n'importe, 
— I entered the " pit/' and quietly substantiated a 
settlement between a " reporter " who had been 
admitted gratis, that he might gather " material " 
for the very flattering notice of . " the players " 

which was to appear in the next " Journal," — 

and a modiste, who had also been admitted gratis, by 
paying certain two shillings, to a very suspicious look- 
ing functionary, yclept the " check taker; " and she, like 
the tyro of the types, had not come without her object: 
— having been deputed by her mistress, a milliner, to 
catch a few hints of " flounce and furbelow," from the 
dress of the lady, who was advertised as a denizen of 
the " Theatre Royal, Covent Garden." 

From these, however, my attention was soon 
called, by a group of citizens, in earnest discussion be- 
fore me : — " What a splendid dress ! " said he, whom 
by certain " sarcenet sureties," I knew to be Mr. 
Tapestring, the draper: — "figured satin, ell-wide! " and 
he made a motion with his arms as if to measure. So 
true is it, that man, whether statesman or draper 
hero or pickpocket, cannot altogether '- sink the shop, 
let circumstances demand it as they may : — Tis his 
" vocation, Hal," and it is " no sin for a man to labour 
in his vocation \" " And then, her beautiful lace veil ! 
with silver sprigs ;" cried Mrs. Tapestring, his wife, 



134 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

pushing in her oar: " Oh, my! I wonder will it wash?" 
" I dont know," replied he of the counter, rather puz- 
zled, — " but I wish I could feel the substance of that 
there satin — it may be a twill." — " Her dress was 
beautiful I'll allow — very ! " now, insinuated the 
Town Heriot,* who had been for the last half hour 
twirling about a paste, which he wore on his finger, 
and which a customer had left that morning with him 
to be repaired — " But did you observe the jewels 
she wore ? — diamonds of the first water ! — or may I 
never set a stone again." " Were they indeed ! " ex- 
claimed all his hearers. — " That they were ;" replied the 
goldsmith, turning away to twirl his paste elsewhere, 
fully satisfied with the sensation he had caused in that 
quarter. 

The group were silent for some moments, when the 
indefatigable Mrs. Tapestring again gave her tongue — 
" Oh, her hair! how tasty it's curled ! — 'pon my word, 
Mr. Strop, you have excelled yourself ! " addressing a 
spare melancholy figure, who, from the incessant snap 
of his fingers, I had settled in my mind to be a barber. 
" She did not come under my curling tongs!" quoth he 
with a sigh, " she brought her own dresser with her 
from Lunnun." 

This very interesting conversation was now broken 
by the repeated cries of " down! " — " hats off! " — and 
the " trades " had hardly time to take their places be- 
fore the curtain gradually rose. — There was a pause — 

* Heriot — James the First's Goldsmith. 

Vide " Fortunes of Nigel. " 



THE ACTRESS. 135 

the pulse of expectation beat for a moment — and the 
next, Miss * * * flashed on the stage, like lighten- 
ing and stood in the centre — a beautiful serpent — all 
the audience fascinated ! — Anon, she gracefully turned— 
and then she danced — tirra-lirra-la !— But oh, her steps? 
— eloquent ! — maddening ! — heart-taking ! — Every one 
appeared to drink in the sense of their exquisiteness, 
till their feelings at last evaporated in one continued 
encore ! which seemed to say — 

" if it were now to die, 

" ' Twere now to be most happy ! " 

But still, as if unconscious of the aches she caused — 
making frequent obeisance, she continued to embody 
all the loveliness that e'er had been displayed by angel, 
or by woman : — still growing more and more brilliant. 
But the senses had been screwed up to the utmost 
pitch — to look now had been madness — and knowing 
it, many were observed to close their eyes as a relief. 
Another burst of rapture — and the curtain fell — and 
gloves and hats were crushed in convulsive extacy ! 

" What a happy woman Miss * * * must be ! " 

said a beautiful girl to her mother, as she threw on her 
shawl, a la Sevigne. — I sighed, and left the house. — 



There is a small bed room in the hotel of , with 

a wax candle burning on the dressing table, evidently 
placed there in readiness for some one's coming. — The 






136 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

clock strikes twelve, and the hurried tread of light feet 
is heard on the stairs — the door opens — and a female 
form, decked with brilliants, as if overpowered by some 
previous exertion, stalks in: — that face is not to be mis- 
taken — it is the beautiful actress returned from the 
theatre. — But, soft — her silver voice — "Thank God! 
it is over — ha! ha! — the glare — the applause — what a 
mockery ! and my poor heart breaking! — I acted well, 
and many envied me, and thought me the thing I 
seemed." — " But," continued she, in a thrill of bitter 
agony — " they would not envy me if they saw me as 
I am ! " Thus saying, she took a wet towel and passed 
it over her face, and the rouge which had served like 
" roses over a sepulchre," to conceal the worm that 
preyed beneath, disappeared and she was as pale as the 
early snow-flower ! — Then she dashed her splendid 
diamond tiara from her head, and her hair fell loose on 
her shoulders: — anon, her lips curled with scorn, as 
approaching the mirror, she beheld the reflection of 
her pallid cheek — on whose surface the spoiler had al- 
ready been too busy ! — She had now exercised misery's 
privilege, and " fool'd herself to the top of her bent ;" 
but grief was not to be cheated of her tears — for on 
opening her casket to put in her jewels, something 
fell out on the floor — she picked it up — but immediately, 
as if it had been a serpent, let it . fall, with a loud 
scream. — It was the portrait of him, whom her young 
heart had loved — had trusted — passing woman's love 
and faith! — and who had meanly, cruelly deceived 
her — and, like a fiend, had added perfidy to his cruelty 



THE ACTRESS. 137 

— had made her letters the sport and jest of his de- 
praved and dissolute companions ! " That man!" said 
she — " what have I not sacrificed for that man ! — and 
he has deliberately spurned me ! — as I now spurn 
him" — and she kicked with her small foot the portrait 
from her — at the same time, regardless of her gala 
dress, threw herself on the bed, and gave vent to a 
hysteric burst of bitter tears. — 

3f» *fC *fC 3fC 3|C IfC 5JC 

***** * * 

" Reader ! — I have been wretched — and still am — 
lonely — neglected — and trodden upon. — Have lived to 
see my dearest friend become my bitterest enemy — my 
hopes, one by one, decay — my best intentions thwarted 
and perverted. — But I never was — nor never will be 
one, who could coolly, with the temperature of a demon, 
betray a young — an innocent — a confiding creature!" 



SOMETHING STIFF. 



Host. — " What says my bullyrook? — Speak scholarly and wisely." 

Merry Wives of Windsor. 



" Your articles are highly amusing, — very ! " said the 
publisher to me the other evening, as I carried him a 
lucubration for the Miscellany, on whose establishment 
I had been retained for some time as essayist and tale- 
bearer ; and averaged my per sheetage accordingly : 
" but 1 want something stiff." " Stiff!" re-echoed I. 
" Yes, stiff:" — something for the waggon train — for you 
know it is'nt every one that can travel by the Hirondelle 
and Berkeley Hunt." 

" I don't understand," responded I, putting on a 
face of Guildhall ignorance and roast goose. 

" Why, something stiff;" reiterated he, with the 
air of a preface to a modern whim wham, discussing 
egotism and common-place. I still remained insen- 
sible. "Then something after the way of Locke on 
the understanding; or Porson on the Greek par- 



SOMETHING STIFF. 139 

tide, — now," growled the paymaster of wit's forces : 
" you comprehend, or 

" Must I couple Hell?" 

"O fie!" cried I, giving him back some small 
change for his Shakespearean coin : " I now under- 
stand — humph ! What say you to an Exquisite's neck- 
scarf?" "Pshaw!" "A great man's condescen- 
sion?" "Pshaw!!" "A poor relation's neck in a 
thorough draught ?" " Pshaw ! ! " "A drill sergeant's 
back?" "Pshaw!" " An article in the 'Foreign 
Quarterly?'" " Pshaw ! ! !" and exit the publisher in 
a huff, and the door in a slam. 

Now there are so many authenticated noun sub- 
stantives in this world to which the qualification of 
" stiff" may be attached, that any particular selection 
would be extremely partial and invidious : " Never- 
theless, there must be something achieved of that kid- 
ney," ruminated I, as having returned to my back 
parlour den, " situate and being " in the classic regions 
of High Holborn, my eye glanced at that fire-engine 
which, in common with others brought up to the bar, 
has so frequently furnished forth one of our National 
similies; and which is very often, and extremely 
facetiously so, too, applied by young ladies, and pos- 
ture professors, to the bows and steps of their re- 
spective Philanders and disciples — to wit — as stiff as a 
poker. 

So, as a preliminary measure, I mixed myself a stiff 



140 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

glass of toddy twist, hot without, as you may well be as- 
sured, a too plentiful corruption of what Horatius Flaccus 
designates, rather anti-teetotally "vilissima rerum" — 
water ; — drank it up — a duplicate — but still no symp- 
toms — a third — a fourth — a fifth ; — and then several 
unbendable illustrations began to stalk in visionary 
" buckram suits " through my brain. First came the 
uniform and unadulterated " respondere parati" of 
hunters, fishers, riders, walkers, shooters, dancers, and 
other amateur labourers, when asked the next morning 
at toast and butter time, after their several feats (query 
feet) how they felt themselves ? " Oh, pretty well, 
only rather stiff." 

Again, followed a set of ill looking officials in plun- 
ket colour coats, in company with a set of as ill looking 
wow-officials, with hardly a coat amongst them, who 
forthwith fell to dragging a river with much bustle and 
assiduity ; until one, who appeared the principal que- 
rist, exclaimed to the sub. whom he delighted to 
honour : " its no use, Bill, the tide has sure to have 
floated down the stiff' un." 

And then I felt a shindy kicking up in my Olympus, 
as if my brains were practising Sir Roger de Coverley's 
fling ; and the scene changed to a gay ball room, dight 
with chalk and wax. Presently a smiling, dapper little 
man advanced, leading a male thing of scent and 
curls, to a female thing of scent and curls ; exclaim- 
ing " Miss Jenkins, Mr. Tomkins — Mr. Tomkins, 
Miss Jenkins; and both inclined stiffly, and again 
.returned to their seats, looking as shamefully as if 



SOMETHING STIFF. 141 

they had been detected in the social enormity of 
listening under their neighbour's parlour window of a 
night. 

These and many more spectred thoughts, illustrative 
of my thesis, rose up in my mind, but I could make 
nothing of them, much less a lucubration ; for as 
soon as I attempted to clutch and transfer them to 
paper, they were gone ! 

At last, hearing the clock strike one, I seized my 
pen, and after some delay, occasioned by mistaking the 
glass for the inkstand, and saluting the bottle with the 
snuffers, instead of the candle, commenced like a lawyer, 
making white black. The next morning, the following 
romaunt, with a covey of blackbirds, grease, and brandy 
ringlets, appeared on the sheet of foolscap, which I had 
placed before me for composition the night before, as 
has been made matter of interest and history. 

" The sun had risen early, like a bagman whose bed- 
stead is inhabited, and for sometime had gilded with 
his gold the romantic town of Dustercleugh, in whose 
streets there was holding the great Midsummer fair : — 
and cattle bellowed — pigs squeaked — horses neighed ; — 
and bipeds very successfully imitated all three ; — while 
the pedestrian, as he passed, scented from his shoes 

" the smell of dairy." * 

When a man 'yclad in broad cloth of mysterious colour 
and tawny top boots, strode with the lofty air of a round 

* Thomson's Seasons. 






142 HUMOUR AND PATHOS, 

of beef revivified, and going to exercise its elective 
franchise, and plump at a contested County election, 
into the Travellers' room at the Green Dragon ; and 
in a side box, having come to a consistency, called 
loudly for the Drawer, and exclaimed in a startling 
authoritative voice : " Waiter ! three pennoth of brandy 
and water, and, d ye hear, d — mee, make it stiff." 



EARLY IMPRESSIONS. 



Early impressions ! — dear, lovely, memorials of the 
days of childhood, when the moral heaven was cloud- 
less, like a Romance's Italian sky — how ought ye to be 
prized and cherished by your fortunate possessors ! 
Tis ye, and ye alone, are the real healthy and unso- 
phisticated workings of outward objects on the heart : 
for the impressions of age ! — what are they ? — only pla- 
giarisms — borrowed from books, — from others — ©r, if 
original, tinted by prejudice and custom ; shaded by 
misanthropy, and finished by vice. 

These first impressions grow with our growth, and 
wither but with our decay. They are the first to welcome 
our debut into this sweet and bitter world, and the 
last — the very last, to quit us : they are the most sin- 
cere, and least swallowlike, of all our friends. In the 
days of affluence and hours of happiness they are our 
most pleasing companions — in the days of indigence 
and hours of agony they are our tenderest nurses ; and, 
in short, their faithfulness exceeds (Ladies, your par- 
don !) that fearful thing, woman's love. It may well 



144 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

be added, in their eulogy, that they have given more 
votaries to the exclusive shrine of Glory ; — more cha- 
racters to be delineated by the romantic pen of the 
historian, than even ambition, that sleepless agitator. 

What made Alexander the conqueror of the world ? 
What made Byron one of the world's finest poets? 
One will tell you chance ; another, emulation ; and a 
third, (shaking his head like him in the " Critic,") that 
it was industry. Let these wise men of Gotham 
enjoy their opinions ; I say it was early impressions ! 
for from them the curious eye may trace the glorious 
after years of many " cselestes animse;" as they always, 
in like manner as external objects do to the Chamelion, 
reflect their hue on our after lives ; or, to use the 
euphony of the " North Countree " poet : they are 

" The shadows which coming events cast before ! " 

Behold ! a tyro swimming his paper argosy in the 
village brook. Day after day he is there, let the wea- 
ther be ever so rebellious, malgre the alternate en- 
treaties and scoldings of his mother ; — malgre, too, the 
Dominie's application of that tree, immortalized by 
Solomon, he still will go ! Look for him in after years : 
you will find him a Nelson ! 

Lo ! a second erects a minute stage, and spouts 
" Now is the winter of our discontent," to his father's 
footman, making day and " night hideous :" — he will 
be a Garrick ! 

A third avoids all the customary exercise of boyhood, 



EARLY IMPRESSIONS. 145 

and makes a lawless acquaintance with babbling 
brooks and " green fields," — " habet foenum: " — he will 
be a poet ! Thus it is, that these impressions enlarge 
themselves, like that beautiful Bible simile, the " mus- 
tard seed ; " which from being the smallest of all seeds, 
by growing by what it feeds upon, becomes so huge 
a tree, that the monarch of the ether and cloud 
leaves his dizzy eyrie to visit its vast circumference of 
shade. 

These impressions, when the world's love, health, 
wealth — when all fail, still remain to make man re- 
spectable to himself. The old, long-remembered 
huntsman, when disabled by the " horrida podagra," 
from following the chase, actuated by these, propelling 
himself round his carpet, scours the country in his arm- 
chair. 

The piscatory disciple of Isaac Walton, in like circum- 
stances, cozy, sitting by the fire, bobs in a washing- 
tub, and ever and anon fancies he feels the well-known 
titillation, and draws up his line with the vigour of 
early years. 

The being long an exile from the land of the pale 
cliffs, let his body be wasted by disease, his years tot- 
tering on the brink of eternity — still will plod his 
weary way back to visit his native village ; to renew 
early acquaintance, and to realize his early attachments. 
And on his arrival, should all his youthful connexions — 
his father — mother — kindred — jocund companions — 
should all be tenants of the tomb that's noiseless, 
and he left like " one who treads some banquet - 

H 



146 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

hall deserted ! " — still he would love that place, because 
it was the scene of his early impressions ! 

When the mind plays the traitor to the body, do 
these impressions waver in their fidelity ? No ! they 
are as enthusiastic, as constant, as pleasing as ever ! 
They follow their possessors as comforters, as com- 
panions to the madhouse — that abode more shocking to 
humanity than the tomb itself— if any doubt, let them 
go to Bedlam and they will find it veritable. 

For there the merchant " haud immemor " of his 
former consequence upon 'Change still cogitates on 
" India stock " and "• three per cent, annuities consol." 
The mathematician, verifying Hogarth's picture, still 
chalks on the wall the " segment of a circle ; " and the 
faded exquisite, " quantum mutatus ab illo," still sedu- 
lously ties and unties his lack lustre cravat, a la Brum- 
mell ; still curls his hair, now in a " wild frenzy rolling" 
down his superior garment, and anoints it with oil con- 
stantly subtracted every night from the lamp for that 
purpose. And though his woe-begone figure no 
longer instilleth soft desire, yet he still cries the fop's 
watch -word, 'pon honour ! and makes love to his broken 
back chair and his table, suffering, may be, under the 
same bodily disablement as his Excellency, the Mar- 
quis of Anglesea ! 

But these impressions do not stop here ; they stick 
to their possessor till death itself. Those that have 
been accustomed to watch the couch of the sick and 
dying must have often seen early hopes, prejudices, 
and fears, predominate to the last. The miser, though 



EARLY IMPRESSIONS. 147 

he is well assured that he has but one little moment 
before his soul will be wafted to the banks of the 
oblivious river, will yet employ that moment in em- 
bracing the pelf, for the sake of which he has foregone 
the pleasures of this world, and perhaps of the next ! 
The player, if a comedian, will shout out in " Cam- 
byses' vein " for sherris sack ! — if a tragedian, he will 
astound the son of iEsculapius, pale with nightly at- 
tendance at his couch, by bellowing out — 

" The Devil damn thee black, thou cream-fac'd loon ! 
Where got'st thou that goose-look ? " 



h2 



PASSAGES FROM THE DIARY OF A 
LATE CLERGYMAN. 



PREFACE TO THE DIARY. 

My life has not been passed in idleness, nor have I 
shown the " steep and thorny way to heaven," while 
I myself trod the — 

u Primrose path of dalliance ; " 

for, without being criminated of boasting, I think it 
has been my lot to christen, marry, and bury, (not to 
mention sundry churchings and prayers to the sick and 
dying,) more than any minister in the triple kingdom : 
and, consequently, I have witnessed many touching 
and heart rending scenes, as will be shown in the course 
of this diary; the keeping of which has served to 
gild the tedium of many a lonely hour; and to bestow 
the moral satisfaction, as each night I reviewed the 
entrances inserted through the day — that " non perdidi 
diem." When first I began the day-book of my pro- 
fessional adventures, I bound myself by a solemn vow 
that it should never be published while I lived : — what 
it will be when I sleep in the little kirk-yard which my 
study window overlooks — I know not! 



THE GUARDSMAN. 149 



No. 1.— THE GUARDSMAN. 

" Oh ! that men should put an enemy into their 
mouths to steal away their brains!" and that they 
should distort a dulceration of life into a bestial vice ! 
It was a wise policy of the Lacedemonians to exhibit 
the inebriated helots to their children, as nothing is 
more competent to expatriate drunkenness than the 
spectacle of a wine inflated man. And indeed, if the 
anatomy of drunkenness* were laid open, and the hor- 
rid vices that compose its system more publicly ex- 
posed, so loathsome and disgusting would its turpitude 
appear, that none, except those utterly lost, would 
quaff a wine cup more. The thought has often re- 
curred to me, that the drunkard's progress, nervously 
and eloquently painted, or written, might be equally 
beneficial with the justly celebrated " Rakes " of Ho- 
garth. 

Should this Diarj ever meet the eye of the public 
the following simple, yet awful consequences attendant 
on intoxication, malgr6 the poverty of the language, 
might have some effect in restraining this daily incres- 
cent vice. Not that I am so sanguine as to suppose 
that the professed and systematic bibber would relin- 
quish his vine -juice for any detail, let it be ever so 
touching: no, not if one were to resurgise from the 

* Since ably done so by tbe late Dr. Macnish, the w Modern Py- 
thagorean " of Blackwood's Magazine. These " passages " first 
appeared in 1832. 



150 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

voidless tomb, and tell him of its heinousness ! Yet 
it may be as a beacon to the thoughtless incipient, who 
has approached too near the maddening rubicon, to 
turn from its brink and retrace his steps in time : for 
its streams possess a magic influence — a serpentine 
fascination to entice the unsuspecting into their vor- 
tex, — where if he once get, no power can save him ! 
About a month preceding the incident I am about, to 
relate, and of which myself was a horrified eye-witness, 

the matrons and wives of the village of H were 

very much alarmed by the unexpected, though not 
unusual phenomenon — the arrival of a serjeant of the 
guards, who came delegated for the express purpose of 
recruiting, as his corps had been of late very much 
curtailed of its members by the inexorable digits of 
death, who cares no more for the splendid " hessians " 
of a guardsman, than for the gilded '• turres " of a 
king ! 

The county of which my cure H forms a par- 
tition, is peculiarly remarkable for the height, strength, 
and fine symmetry of its male residents ; and has been 
so, if we believe Camden and the old monkish authors, 
for time immemorial. This guardsman, whose name 
was Topham, was a particularly handsome specimen of 
one of the finest body of men in this or any other 
kingdom — the king's guards; therefore, his arrival 
created no little sensation among the village grisettes. 
For the succeeding Saturday, after they had disposed 
of their agrarian commodities, many were the farmers' 
daughters who were seen to enter the shop of Mr. 



THE GUARDSMAN. 151 

Silktwist, the draper, and to exit the same shop with 
neat little paper parcels, which might contain ribbons, 
silk neckerchiefs, and gauze, as ammunition to begin 
the attack the Sunday following on the heart of the 
handsome soldier. But insupportable was their disap- 
pointment, when at church the guardsman handed no 
less a person into a seat than his wife : and that f she 
was bond fide his spouse, the lynx optics of half a dozen 
damsels soon discovered, by the plain gold ring that 
encircled her finger. After this invention, I had to 
observe that my feminine audience paid more than 
usual attention to the " service." This was the first 
and last appearance of the guardsman at my church. 
Hitherto, (for this short period,) his conduct and man- 
ner of living were most unexceptionable. But the 
scene was soon to be changed ; and as events finally 
happened, fatally for the worse. Unused to such lax 
discipline, and free from the surveillance of martial 
controul, he soon committed himself to unrestrained 
debauchery; and got acquainted with a set of idle 
" neer do weel's," who haunted the purlieus of the 
adjoining town. With them he passed his days and 
nights at a low pandemonium, called the '< Lamb ; " 
and with them I saw him, heedless of the degradation 
to himself and his corps, playing at " chuck-farthing;" 
while about three in the morning he trundled home, 
in the most demoniac humour, making " night hideous" 
with his blasphemous imprecations ; and, on his ar- 
rival at his lodgings, pouring out the phials of his ine- 
briated fury on his poor inoffensive wife, whom, as the 



152 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

neighbours said, he beat in the most savage manner, 

so that her moans might be heard for miles. * 

***** * 

* * * (Here there is a hiatus, 

and the diary is mute on the subject, 'till the night of 
the catastrophe, when we find the following.) 

Feb. 6th, 10 o'clock, night. — Returning from the 

town of , I met the guardsman, maddening 

drunk, and in the most portentous state of excitement. 
I could see the molten liquor which he had imbibed 
ebbing and flowing like a spring tide in his temples ; 
and his lurid breath, as I passed him, seemed like the 
first scent of Gehenna, which the damned snuffle in, 
as shrieking, the arch-fiend hurries them down. — 
" Jam premit nox:" — a thought which I could not 
restrain, arose in my mind, that 'ere the night was 
passed this man would commit some horrid deliction ; 
and so great was my presentiment of impending evil, 
that I was once, or twice, inclined to return, and have 
him put in safe custody for the night. 

Twelve o'clock the same night. — Was awakened by a 
loud knock at my bed-room door ; on enquiring the rea- 
son of this untimely palpitation, I recognized the voice 
of my servant, who propounded that I must rise imme- 
diately, and go to the guardsman's wife, who was dying ! 
I hastily donned my clothes, and walked with a quick 
step towards the lodgings of the guardsman. On ap- 
proaching the house, I was greatly shocked by hearing 
Topham inside, yelling out the most horrible oaths. 
Having reached the cottage, I applied my finger to the 



THE GUARDSMAN. 153 

latch; the door opened, and I found myself in the 
kitchen ; the guardsman, who appeared to have been 
prevented from going up stairs by a door, which was 
bolted on the other side, was essaying with all his 
weakened, but still Sampsonian strength, to force it 
open ; threatening the most dreadful revenge if it were 
not opened to him. 

On my expostulating with him upon the barbarity 
of his conduct, he fiercely turned round, and with his 
drawn hanger, (for he wore his side arms,) ordered me 
to quit the house. Seeing full well that it was no time 
for reasoning, I laid hold of a spit which hung over 
the fire place, more as an ornament than an utensil, 
and struck the sword out of his hand, and pinned him 
to the wall. In this enthralment I held him, with the 
assurance, that if he made any more disturbance, I 
would run him through ; at the same time declaring 
my holy function. Upon hearing this, with a very 
bad grace he made a sort of an apology, which ter- 
minated with " Why, you see, sir, you must excuse 
me; I haven't been used to such things — I don't un- 
derstand parsons; I am in the guards! "* 

The scuffle had been heard above stairs, and the bar- 
red door was opened by * * *, the physician, who, it 
appeared, had sent for me, as the poor woman, after 
her delivery, was in great danger. 

On entering the little bed room, I found the poor 
woman breathing with difficulty, yet still sensible — her 

* This apology of the guardsman is matter of fact. 
H 3 



154 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

eyes fixed with maternal fondness on the little babe, 
which had just struggled into this world of ours, and 
which, carefully wrapped in swathes, was placed near 
the bed. Seeing her departure was not very distant, 
I opened the book, and as all knelt down, read that 
beautiful portion of the church service so appropriate 
for the dying. I had not proceeded far before 1 was 
interrupted by a slight rustle in the bed, accompanied 
by a deep drawn suspiration, such as is excited when 
we view something horrible to the feelings — as a 
child escapeless, inevitably about to be crushed by the 
rotation of a wheel — the favourite hero of a drama 
about to be led to instant execution. I looked up; the 
eyes of the dying were intently watching something at 
the further end of the room. My gaze followed in 
that direction, and I beheld the guardsman, who must 
have entered unperceived, dancing the infant in his 
arms, like a nurse ; himself reeling backwards every 
now and then ; while the child was in the most immi- 
nent danger of being thrown every instant. What was 
to be done ? — if either of us moved to take it from 
him, in turning from us he would, most likely, drop the 
babe. I drew in my breath, and waited in horrible 
uncertainty for the event ! 

Now he seems as if he were tired, and would place 
it on a chair — now he dangles it again! — But, ha! 
that piercing shriek — eternal mercy ! the father stum- 
bles — and the babe, in his descent, is hurled into the 
red lurid flames of the bed-room grate ! For all of us 
to rush and extract it from the fire, was the work of an 



THE GUARDSMAN. 155 

instant — the poor mother rushed too ! Oh ! there was 
something awful, yet beautiful, to see the pale, sepul- 
chral being, who before another hour would be a denizen 
of some other sphere, standing in breathless anxiety ; 
watching, nay, assisting the means for reviving her 
dear offspring ! As long as there appeared hope, she 
was calm — she was contented ; but when, in reply to 
her beseeching look, the physician shook his head, the 
iron appeared to have entered her heart's core ; for, 
approaching the blackened remains of what was her 
child, she kissed its cremated cheek, and, looking up to 
heaven, exclaimed, in a thrilling whisper, " hush! hush ! 
my babe ! don't cry — I shall soon be with you ! " Then, 
stalking up to her wretched husband, who had beheld 
the whole scene with stupid wonder, she laid her hand 
on his shoulder, and giving him one piteous look, (but 
oh! that look!) fell a cold, cold corpse on the floor! 
That look instantaneously sobered the guardsman, who 
now being aware of the horrible catastrophe occasioned 
by his intoxication, fainted away, and only recovered 

to be a mowing idiot for life ! 

* * * * * * * 

Years have avolated since that night; and the once 
handsome guardsman, now transformed into a sort of 

modern Autolycus, may be seen in the streets of , 

followed by a myriad of boys, and chanting, with the 
heart-rending humour so customary to idiots, the fol- 
lowing eulogy on his wares : — 

" Eight rows a penny, oh ! 
Be not those too many, oh ! 



156 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

Eight rows a penny, oh ! 

The best London pins. 

Four and twenty needles, oh ! 

All for one penny, oh ! 

Some to make the lady's gown, 

And some to sew the flounces round — 

Four and twenty needles, oh ! 

All — all, for one penny, oh ! " * 

Postscript to the Diary. — Poor Topham is since 
dead, and his grave may be seen in the village church- 
yard of H . The lines he was wont to sing are, 

at the express desire of the ill-fated idiot, engraved on 
his tomb, which is frequently visited by the poor men- 
dicant, for the purpose of learning the rhymes. Should 
any ever hear these lines, we hope they will pause for 
1 a moment, and listen ; and, if going to a drinking 
party, or dinner, may it be a warning to take a glass 
or two less ! 



No. 2.— THE LOST BRIDE. 

Oh! how often in this mutatory life is the spark- 
ling fresh draught of felicity dashed from the thirsty 
lips of those about to quaff it ! And how often do we 

* The above lyric which is here given verbatim, and in its original 
metreless state, was chanted by a poor wanderer, who for many years 
made a periodical tour through the west of England, as a vendor of 
pins, needles, and such like inconsiderate merchandise. Latelv, how- 
ever, his usual visitations have been (it is supposed by death) dis- 
continued. 



THE LOST BRIDE. 157 

see a smiling family, the happiest of the happy — who 
gave life to the dance, and who electrified with joyous- 
ness the company wheresoever they went, by their 
good-humoured courtesies — how often do we behold 
such a family suddenly invaded by the tearful sorrow 
and the gory misfortune ! To observe such a thing at 
any time is melancholy — nay to hear of it is so; but 
to have been acquainted with — to have visited a family 
thus situated — oh ! it is heart-rending ! Who, under 
such circumstances, when he beheld the house, en- 
deared by hospitality and friendship ; in which he had 
passed many a pleasing hour ; and in which so many 
agreeable friends had commingled together, for one and 
the same object — enjoyment — who has not felt sick at 
heart, when he saw that domicile desolate, and like 

" A shrine midst recks forsaken 
Whence the oracle hath fled ! " 

This is, perhaps, one of the most pathetic passages 
in my diary. It is touchingly illustrative of the weather- 
vane uncertainty of all terrestrial felicity ! and, to the 
attentive reader, its moral, without further circumlo- 
cution, may be summed up in the emphatic phrase 
of Scripture — " Lay up for yourselves treasures in 
heaven ! " 

Twenty years ago, the now delapidated and deserted 
C Castle, was inhabited by the legitimate de- 
scendant of its founder. I was a young man then, just in 

orders, and resident curate of H , of which, by the 

decease of the incumbent, I have since become rector, 



158 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

The De C , as he was called, (for the foreign ad- 
junct of Mr. was never linked to his name;) who then 
dwelt in it, was a generous representative of the old 
English lords of the manor — not as they are now — but 
as they were under the rule of the Stuarts. In person 
he was of gigantic stature, being six feet without his 
shoes. Though well proportioned, his limbs certified 
that in his youth his strength must have been uncon- 
querable. His face was tinged with the vermillion of 
robustious health, and manifested the use of unsophis- 
ticated liquors ; and to finish his portraiture, there was a 
certain grateful sphericity about his contour, which won 
the heart of the beholder, and which the Quiritian Caesar 
would have wished Cassius to have possessed. Jealous 
of innovation, he still kept to the old fashion of frog- 
ged coat, buckles, ruffles, silk hose, sword, &c. ; and 
allowed his silvery hair, which equalled spun glass 
in its texture, to fall over his shoulders. Being the 
last of a long illustrious race, he determined to adhere 
to those customs and ideas which had been for the 
space of a millenium used as laws in the family. So 
he always, in old baronial style, dined in the castle 
hall ; he, his family, and guests taking the superior end 
of the table ; while, below a large antiquated salt-cellar 
of clumsy workmanship, with the arms engraved upon 
it, were placed the domestics, as of old. 

Often have I partaken of his hospitality, and often 
have others done so : and oh ! it was an exhilarating 
sight to behold the fine, majestic ultimate of a hundred 
warriors, surrounded by the pictures and trophies of 



THE LOST BRIDE. 159 

his name, feasting in the hall of his fathers ! — in the 
very hall in which all his Celtic ancestors caroused, 
since he of the strong bow had conquered the " land 
which is seated by the seas." 

Though the Stuarts were extinct, and a stranger held 
the Stuart's throne, he was still a warm partizan of 
their cause. But people did not wonder — his father 
died at Culloden — and his eyes often flashed sparks of 
enthusiasm as he related how, when but a stripling, he 
had been introduced by his father, and had kissed the 
hands of the " lad with the bonnie light hair." And, 
indeed, so great was his veneration for this ill-starred 
family, that when any-ways out of humour, he would 
instantaneously regain his good nature, if such tunes 
as '• Over the water to Charley ;" or, " There 11 never be 
peace 'till King Jamie comes home ;" were sung or played 
to him. Every one has his hobby ; his was to explain 
the deeds done by the realities of the presentments 
which adorned the old hall. To some this would have 
been wearisome, but to me it was highly interesting. 
" This," he would say, pointing to a grim figure, with 
an adunque nose, and a beard like a chancellor's wig : 

"this is Sir Gaston de C , the founder of our 

family, who came over with Gulielmus Bastardus." — 

" That is Sir Hugh de C , or dark Sir Hugh, as 

he was more commonly called in the chronicles of the 
time, who went on an expedition to the Holy Land, 
but never returned :" — and he would wipe with his 
handkerchief the dust from a portrait of a very ques- 
tionable looking man, whose representative few would 



160 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

like to meet in a winter night — and so on, 'till he had 
told the history of all. Then he would recite the 
wonders of many suspicious looking implements, which 
he dignified with the grandiloquent titles of " battle 
axes — harquebusses — falchions — cuirasses — Andrea de 
Ferraras," &c. &c. 

But his greatest pride was his daughter, his Louisa. 
She was his only child, and also his last remaining re- 
lative ; — her mother had died in giving her birth ; and a 
laughter-loving playful girl she was, with an eye per- 
fectly coal black, always beaming with an arch and fas- 
cinating expression ; and fond of wearing her frock 
short to disclose her pretty swelling leg. All vivacity, 
all mirthful, her joyous pranks were the theme of both 
young and old. But still there was nothing bold or 
immodest : hers was the gaiety excited by the over- 
flowing exuberance of a guileless heart. Unconscious 
of the existence of deceit, she was frank to excess. 
A true village maiden, she delighted in valentines — 
made true lover's knots — and believed in ghosts and 
fairies — though she did not fear them. She was fond 
of games, and often might be seen in her father's hall, 
playing at hookman's buff, in which pastime never 
did the 

" smooth bandage bind 



Eyes more devoutly willing- to be blind !" 

Oh ! I think I see her yet, skipping in her little 
satin slippers, like a young fawn, with all its agility and 
grace. And then her happy healthful laugh ! — it haunts 



THE LOST BRIDE. 161 

me still, though years many, many, have passed, like 
the holy melody that steals through the midnight air ! 



Louisa had early been affianced to the son of a 
neighbouring gentleman, who had been her youthful 
playmate, her first love, and her choice. Edward 
D'Este, for by that name I shall call him, was more 
mentally gifted than the generality of young men of 
his years ; as he knew something besides how to shoot 
a swallow on the wing, or how to entwine a neck -cloth 
a la Doricourt. He had made the grand tour of Europe, 

as it was then called, and had lately returned to H , 

and to his Louisa, bringing with him a rich store of 
improvement. As it had been agreed that on his 
return the youthful lovers should be united, prepara- 
tions were immediately began for the celebration of the 
nuptials. The day at last arrived which was to join 
two kindred hearts, and to realize an attachment that 
had passed without the usual contre terns and inter- 
ruptions- 
Early in the morning the procession, attended by a 
long line of chariots, and a large assemblage of the 
villagers, dressed in their holiday clothes, (for it was to 
them quite a jubilee,) entered the church ; where the 
bride, clad in nivalian white, (woman's best attire!) 
and a string of pure pearls corrolated about her hair, 
blushing, gave her hand and her heart to her first and 
only love — her Edward. Great was the manifestation 
of joy at the event. The old father was in extacies, 



162 



HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 



and as he returned from the ceremony, shaking every 
one he met by the hand, till the blood almost started 
from their nails ; he heartily invited all indiscriminately 
to spend the rest of the day at the castle. But how 
cheating are all sublunary enjoyments ! The hair- 
suspended weapon hangs over all heads, even over those 
most apparently happy. 

The epulary 'larum had twice been rung — the rare 
viands were almost spoiled for want of serving ; but 
when all had taken their seats, there arose a murmur of 
disappointment — the queen of the feast, the black-eyed 
bride was wanting! — nor was she to be found all over 
the mansion ! It was strange ! for a few minutes be- 
fore she had been with Edward in the garden, gathering 
strawberries ; and there had left him, joking, laughing, 
and looking back over her shoulder, inviting him to 
kiss her; and flying onward, her lily finger beckoning 
him to follow ! The father tried to laugh it off, (though 
it was evident he was alarmed) and exclaimed — " Here's 
a health to the little puss ! she's at her games again ; 
ha! ha!" and turning to the bridegroom, who was 
deadly pale, he said : " it's only to tease you ;" and he 
quaffed the rich " Lachryma Christi;" but as he carried 
the glass to his lips, I observed his hand shook, and he 
spilt the wine. This faint endeavour at raillery did 
not restore mirth to the banquet. Most of the guests 
had relinquished their silver cutlery. Here and there, 
to be sure, among the villagers below the salt, a solitary 
knife and fork broke the awful silence, and grated 
against the pewter platter, with, as it were, a sepulchral 



THE LOST BRIDE. 163 

sound. And even my Lord L , so famous for 

piquant bon mots and repartees was tongueless ! The 
pulse of time seemed to be down! it was awfully 
dreadful to see so many clad in the trappings of mirth, 
now gaping at vacancy in inconceivable alarm ! — then 
viewing with scrutiny the empty chair, as if expecting 
to behold some ghastly spectre extended on it ! anon, 
as a footstep was heard without, straining their eyes in 
eager expectancy. 

Thus matters remained; 'till all patience seemed to 
be exhausted ; when, every one, having regarded his 
neighbour with a dreadful intelligence, rose up — and 
there was a simultaneous movement — but orderly — no 
pushing — all walked in silence to the door ; where they 
divided into parties, and each division took a separate 
way in search. Every avenue, every room, every cre- 
vice was investigated ; and all the surrounding country 
scoured by horsemen, but to no purpose! Fearful 
whispers, of I know not what, were flitting about ; — 
but alas ! she was not ! and from that hour never more 
did the music of her silver feet resound in the home of 
her childhood ! 

Poor Edward ! others have endured woes, but theirs 
came more gradually — more slowly, so they were in a 
manner prepared for them; but o'er thee they "broke 
at once, when all seemed extacy ! " All my endeavours 
to console him were futile; for, with the big tear glisten- 
ing in his eye, he would exclaim : " You have never 
lost a lovely bride — a first love: — you have never had 
the treasury, in which you garnered up your heart, 



164 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

broken open — and a 'pearl richer than all its tribe' taken 
away!" Weary of his cheerless existence, he entered 
the army, and wilfully seeking danger, he afterwards 
died at Waterloo ! I heard, that when he was found, 
his hand was firmly grasping a miniature, which was 
the similitude of a lady, in her earliest youth and love- 
liness. To extract it from him was impossible, without 
cutting off the hand ; so it was buried with him. Such 
was the untimely end of one, who had the palm of fe- 
licity snatched from him by envious fate, at the very 
goal ! 

But the most melancholy part remains for me to 
tell. It is of the idiot father ! — for this bereavement 
had scathed his reason. And he had forgotten all his 
friends, and had given up all intercourse — all interest 
of passing events, and never laughed more. His an- 
cestral domain, once his pride, was neglected and 
desolate, and half shut up ; while the courts and walks 
were choked with rank weeds; and even his pictures 
were now disregarded. A boding gloom seemed to 
brood over every thing. No more did the lofty cupola 
re-echo with the loud wassail song! The "harp was 
mute in Tara's hall ! " Often might the old man be 
seen, bent double with sorrow, led by a little boy, 
wandering about the bye-ways, as if in search of some- 
thing he wished to find. 
* * * * * * 

June 21, . Called on the De C the first 

time since the inauspicious bridal day. He was in a 
little old fashioned room above stairs — his attendant 



THE LOST BRIDE. 165 

sitting with him, when the following little scene took 
place. — " Well, my dear sir, I hope I see you well? " 
said I, as I shook him by the hand. " Oh, very well," 
replied he with a sigh. Then, with a gay air, he en- 
quired : " but would you not wish to see Louisa ?" I 
saw by a sign from the attendant that I had better not 
cross him, so I assented with a nod. And he pro- 
ceeded to call in a low voice, "Louisa! Louisa!" — 
" But perhaps," said he looking earnestly at me — " per- 
haps she did not hear: I'll call louder — Louisa! 
Louisa ! " Here I could hold no longer, and the tears 
fairly trickled down my cheeks ; upon observing which, 
he knelt down, and, with clasped hands, supplicated 
me to tell him where his child was. " Pray, do not 
mock me," said he, " I know I am a grey haired old 
man, and to speak the truth, not right here," pointing 
to his head; " but oh! I loved my child! indeed, sir, 
I did." — And he would not rise till I promised his 
daughter should be with him very shortly. I then took 
my leave; and I heard from the attendant that he is 
often thus ; and always has a chair and plate set at table 
for his daughter, and waits twenty minutes by his watch 
for her arrival, before he will eat ! 

July 3, . This day, I received a message to 

attend the castle. On my arrival, I found the old man, 

attended by H B , the physician, propped up 

with cushions, seated in the great hall; and close op- 
posite was hung the " Death Picture."* I shuddered, 

* The " Death Picture"— Here it is necessary to explain, that it 
was a custom in the De C family to hang up the picture of every 



166 



HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 



for I knew too well what it foreboded, He was greatly 
changed since I saw him last — for he was evidently 
dying ; yet little, or no remains of his idiotcy appeared 
left. After I had made some usual inquiries, in a 
solemn voice he said : " I have seen her ! I have seen 
my Louisa! Last — last night, I was awakened by a soft 
voice ; I arose in the bed, and lo ! at the foot curtains 
stood Louisa smiling — her arms opened, as if to em- 
brace me : I called to her, but gloomily she pointed to 
the moon-lighted sky, and vanished, She's in heaven, 
and T shall die happy!" Here, he paused and did not 
allude to this subject any more ; and another appeared 
to engross his attention — for presently, he examined, 
one by one, all the pictures minutely. And when he 
had finished, a tear trembled in his eye ; but before I 
could enquire the reason, he himself disclosed it.- 

" This is a sad effeminate end for a De C to die/' 

said he, with a sickly smile, as he pointed to the 
cushions ; " I am the last of my name, but the first 

that ever died thus ! All my ancestors, Mr. , 

ended their being in the ' big wars ' on the battle field. 
But if 1 shall not expire as a hero, at least my last mo- 
ments will be surrounded by the effigies of those who 
did! " Here his voice failed. — There was a slight con- 
vulsion about the lineaments of his countenance — it 
ceased — and in the next moment he was gone to where 

male, on his dying day, with those of his ancestors. This is not 

peculiar to the house of the De C ; as it is to this day, I believe, 

observed in the ancient family of the Symondses of Mynde Park, 
Herefordshire. 



THE LOST BRIDE. 167 

the chiefs that peopled history's romantic annals had 
gone before. 

Never did I behold so calm a dissolution — so short too, 
— without a pang — without a sigh. — It truly verified the 
Scripture — " Surely the end of the good man is peace! " 

So died the last of the De C 's, and almost the last of 

those old-school characters, which a false refinement is 
fast expatriating from our land. Soon there will be none 
such ! and their like will only be found in the vivid 
description of a romance. — There may arise men more 
mouth honouring, more book read, and less blunt. — 
But they will be a poor exchange for that extinct race, 
whose respectability consisted in the artless simplicity 
and moral rectitude of their lives ! # * 

Years rolled on — the sad story of Louisa and her 
idiot father was forgotten, and strangers dwelt in the 

heritage of the De C s ; when one rainy November 

day, the young mistress of the castle, having exhausted 
all her stock of amusements, and weary of being " put 
into circumspection and confine ; " in a fit of ennui, 
accompanied by many beauteous satellites, determined 
to explore the secrets of the hoary pile. They had 
not proceeded far in their investigation, when in a 
gloomy corridor, a chest, strongly girt with corroded 
iron, and richly carved with burlesque ornaments, lying 
as if unnoticed for centuries, in an indented crypt, 
caught the gaze of one and all. A consultation was 
held; when it was proposed by one — as arch, as laughter- 
loving, as thoughtless as Louisa — " Let us move it 






168 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

from its dusty obscurity." — No sooner said than done. 
The servants were called, and the chest was lifted across 
the gallery ; but in its transport the bottom board 
broke — burst and fell ! Shrieking, the young girls 
fled-Mfor lo! out had tumbled a blanched, fleshless 
skeleton ! — a string of pearls — together with some mi- 
nute shreds of what appeared to have been a satin 
robe ! All else was dust — save, however, a plain gold 
ring — a wedding one — and a little amethyst locket, set 
round with gold, the back engraven with a name — and 
that name — Louisa ! 

The mystery of her strange disappearance was now 
solved. Alas ! poor, hapless girl ! thus then, had she found 
a cheerless tomb; and on her bridal day, too! In this 
old chest had she hidden herself, fluttering with joy, the 
happiest of the happy; thinking, when caught, to leap 
out and scare her seekers. — But the lid 'closed, and a 
spring lock, (doubtless made by some ancestor for the 
preservation of treasure,) fastened her down from 
father, husband, and the wholesome air, for ever ! 



PRINCIPLE AND INTEREST. 



* Rolla, the kinsman of the king is the idol of our army ; 
in war a tiger, chafed hy the hunter's spear ; in peace, more 
gentle than the unweaned lamb. Cora was once betrothed to him ; 
but finding she preferred Alonzo, he resigned his claim and, I fear, 
his peace to friendship and Cora's happiness ; yet, still he loves her 
with a pure and holy fire." — Pizarro, Act ], Scene 2. 

Prince H. — " Where shall we take a purse to-morrow, Jack? " 
Fatstaff. — " Where thou wilt, I'll make one ; and I do not, call me 
villain, and baffle me !" — Henry IV. Act 1, Scene 2. 

There are two things which regulate men's move- 
ments in this life, — Principle and Interest. The first 
is professed by the few; the last by the million, or at 
least in the ratio of two to one : as, for corroboration, 
the social fact — 

" There were two who lov'd their neighbour's wives, 
And one who lov'd his own ! ! " 

In rank, Principle is a poor, clever, witty, half-fed 
curate, with forty pounds per annum; a house full of 
smoke, wet clothes, and soap suds ; sixteen great and 
small children, two pigs, a fat wife, and a seedy coat, 
whose colour the village tailor remembers to have been 

i 



170 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

black — or at least, pepper and salt, when he was a boy. 

On the other hand, Interest is the fat, portly Vicar 
of Bray, residing in a well " stockit " farm and man- 
sion, filled, like himself, with good things; and who, in- 
stead of sixteen bantlings, has one sickly boy, " my 
son, sir;" a compound of all the sweets of the adjacent 
cake-shops. While as to the matter of coats, he has 
more changes of them than the Roman Lucullus had 
of cloaks. 

" Consistency is my motto/' says the curate, as he 
inks the seams and seems of his diseased garment heb- 
domadally, every sabbath morning. — "What! the rectory 

of , if I'll change my coat ? " monologues the vicar : 

" here goes then ! " and he turns his sleeves inside out- 
wards, after the esteemed method of little boys when 
they celebrate their races. But to proceed, — Principle 
is always on the weak side ; catch Interest on any but 
the strong ! Again, Principle really has patriotism, 
though, owing to his brevity of " twine,"* he obtain 
no credit for it. But it is Interest who is loud in his 
professions of it; and who frequently gets believed, 
till, in a luckless hour, the money bag falls from beneath 
his " Mackintosh," and discovers the cheat ! 

Principle will uphold his creed, let it be moral, or 
political, in spite of ridicule, persecution, gallows, 
guillotines, and auto dafe's. Interest will do nothing 
half so foolish. Principle, too, will adhere in allegiance 
to his sovereign, through good and through bad repute; 



Cash. 



PRINCIPLE AND INTEREST. 171 

never tarrying to enquire whether his private affairs 
are likely to culminate, or depress, by his attachment; 
or whether his king be a tyrant, or bigot ; it makes no 
consideration or difference to him: feat and leal he 
will be to the end. Yes, with his last breath he will do 
homage to him, and cry vive le roi ! on the scaffold. 

In some of these points, Interest will not act dissi- 
milarly ; though he is not such a goose as to follow any 
one through bad report ; yet, so far is he alike, that 
it is not of the least consequence to him whether 
his suzerain be a tyrant or not, so long as he is anointed 
with the oil of place and palms: — but should the cruse, 
like the widow's of old, dry up — and the throne begin 
to totter — a la minute, he will cry " vive la republique !" 
to the first sans-culotte, who has the audacity to unfurl 
the tricoloured flag, and clap the night-cap of liberty on 
his poll. 

Of yore, Principle was Fabricius — was Regulus ; 
while Interest, in every age and clime, was always a Tal- 
leyrand. Among nations Principle is the Jew, whose 
faith centuries have not shaken; Interest the Cartha- 
genian, who had never any to shake. " This is all very 
rare for Principle ; but mutatis mutandis : who is it 
that steals the hearts of all the beauteous women ? " 
Interest ! " And has all the fat legacies left him ? " — 
ditto, Interest. " What then, does poor Principle get? " 
Answer, vice versa: — the scorn of all the ugly ones ; 
and, by way of remembrance in the will, permission to 
lament, like the fellow who Horace tells us, had — 

" Nil sibi legatum prseter plorare ! " 



172 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

Query, — " Then has Principle no advantages — no 
sops in the pan V* Yes : " He may inflate the indig- 
natory muscle of his mouth, and " ore rotundo," pro- 
claim Interest to be a Jim Crow, a turn coat, an 
ambidexter, a jack of both sides, &c. &c. &c." — 
" Pshaw ! But does he obtain nothing for his ^in- 
terested conduct ? " — "No; nothing at all. Yet stay, — 
Yes; broken heads, ditto windows, brick bats, and pebble 
stones!" 

" Hum ! this is not a very agreeable prospect for 
the incipient professor of Principle it must be con- 
fessed/' " There you are wrong : is the honour of the 
thing nothing ? As, take an instance : — Suppose the 
tories, at this present hour, extinct ; (they will sans 
doute shortly be so,*) and that only a few organic re- 
mains are left, who are followed, as they stalk along 
the streets, in their dreadnoughts and leripoop shoes, 
like an Italian with a dancing poodle, — say, would it be 
nothing to be one of these same organic remains ; and 
to have the opportunity of exemplifying, in your own 
person, the moral grandeur of knocking down your 
enemies with one hand, while, a la Sir Charles 
Wetherell, you hold up your inexcusables with the 
other ? Would it be nothing, too, to possess the bliss- 
ful privilege of lowering contemptuously on all around 
whose political tenets are in antipodes to your own ; 

* Since the original publication of this paper, the above random 
prophecy, playfully at the time thrown out, has been realized : for 
those who were tories then have now accepted the more sensible name 

of conservatives So, literally, the tories have been for some time 

extinct. 



PRINCIPLE AND INTEREST. 173 

while your breast heaves and swells with conscious rec- 
titude and moral dignity ; never deigning to vent a sigh, 
save when memory brings back to you a vision of the 
good old days of Wellington and Peel, and the dear 
king, who perpetrated the best bows and worst puns of 
any man in his three realms?" 

But onwards — Principle, if it has its white side, has 
also, like Pythagoras's relations (Beans,) its black ones. 
In a word, it may become ridiculous : as in the case 
when some small, " wee" tradesbody, with eyes like 
saucers full of milk and water, assumes the " atrocem 
animum Catonis;" and outrageously refuses, upon prin- 
ciple, (lege interest,) to deal out his wares to one whose 
moral or political creed is at variance to his own ; or, 
when in domestic life, an old maid, who, like our sister, 
in Euripides,* " has been a virgin a long time," cruelly 
persists upon Principle (lege necessity,) not to marry. 
But here let it not be supposed that we think principle 
incompatible with any one but a gowned Roman ; or that 
it is out of its sphere in the domestic circle — far from 
it. On the contrary, our heart will ever beat in unison 
with his who is true to his first love, though that first 
love's beauty, by time, or accident, has faded; — and 
constant to his friend, though that friend has sunk be- 
neath the " summer's sun " of good report, and, per- 
haps, is no longer worthy of esteem. 

Principle, too, like many other staunch, old out-and- 
outers, is often apt to be lead headed; and then, when 

* " Trapdive fiayjpbv $rj fxr/^og 'HXi^rpa Xjoovov." 

Orestes, 72nd line. 



174 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

he has seized the wrong opinion by the ear, he is as 
tenacious of it as an eel in a frying pan; never sup- 
posing that the hair which suspended the sword over 
the head of the voluptuary was less narrow than the 
line which separates true principle from its three tri- 
butary streams, — prejudice, obstinacy, and bigotry. 
Notwithstanding, however, this perverseness, so inci- 
dent as an alloy even to the sublimer qualities of our 
nature, we revere a steady principle, if it is only exem- 
plified in our servants' handing wine to our guests, 
without saturating their habiliments. 

And, in accordance with this our veneration, to the 
man of steady principles, we say : pursue your virtuous 
course ; waver not ; — but then, do not persecute those 
who differ from you. For is it requisite, because you 
love cream that you should blaspheme custard ? On 
the contrary, bear in your mind, that man's political as 
well as his moral creed, is — 

" Between him and his maker ! " 

and that, if a man's opinions are bad, they will not 
become a whit better, though you burn, roast, toast, or 
smoke him ! 



THE OLD MAN'S TALE. 



One fatal remembrance, one sorrow that throws, 
Its bleak shade alike o'er our joys and our woes ; 
To which life nothing darker, or brighter can bring — 
For which joy has no balm— and affliction no sting ! 

Irish Melodies. 



Alas ! they had been friends in youth ; 
But whispering tongues can poison truth ; 



They. parted — ne'er to meet again ! 

But never either found another, 

To free the hollow heart from paining — 

They stood aloof, the scars remaining, 

Like cliffs, which had been rent asunder : — 

A dreary sea now flows between. — Christabel. 

All those who are in the habit of mingling much in 
society, must have observed a set of men, rather past 
the middle age of life, whom every one knows by 
sight — but none by circumstance ; and who infest, as 
it were, the marches of gaiety and fashion: — and hang, 
like a suspended weapon, o'er the scenes they seem, by 



176 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

some strange interdict of fate, incapacitated from enjoy- 
ing ! — They are to be found in the parks of a morning — 
at the exhibitions — in fact, every where, where there is 
a crowd, and where misery may be cheated of a tear. — 
But never in solitude, — uninhabited solitude. And in 
the evening, their icy gaze meets your eye at the 
theatres, immoveable, amidst the applause of a whole 
audience : — for they never applaud. — And in the gay 
party, too, they are the morals, which cause the laugh 
to die away on the lips of the young and beautiful ! 
Again, if you go to the post office, they are there, 
asking for letters ; though it never appears they receive 
any: — go to the libraries, — they are there, also; in- 
quiring for the new novel, which their looks tell, they 
have neither the desire or intention to read. — In a 
word, they go every where — look at every thing — and 
seem to be interested in every thing — yet, their ab- 
straction tells they are in nothing. — Why they are 
thus? — or, wherefore? — no one knows: — for whatever 
their grief — they do not complain — are never heard to 
sigh, or seen to drop a tear: — But their whole life 
appears to be consumed in flying from something infi- 
nitely dreadful behind; — and seeking something equally 
beautiful before. — Thus, they hurry from scene to 
scene — from watering-place to watering-place : — and 
are, in fact, the Wandering Jews of society, who find 
their solitude in crowds! 

In the autumn of 18 — , at the little watering-place 

of T , it was my lot to fall in with one of these 

mysterious beings: — go where I would I met him — 



THE OLD MAN'S TALE. 177 

and in every scene, however gay, he wore the same 
cold look of abstraction : — and the dry eye, which, 
like the fabled temple of Belus,* seemed to have been 
emptied of its moisture, and was not to be filled 
again ! 

He was a man apparently turned of fifty, or there- 
abouts ; though he looked much older : — yet, notwith- 
standing he had long passed the Rubicon of middle life, 
he had incurred none of the habits of an old man, — 
took no snuff, — or ever exhibited symptoms of that 
garrulity so common to those of his time of life : — on 
the contrary, though he frequently visited places of 
public resort, he studiously shunned any thing like 
intercourse with its inmates, and uniformly returned 
your greeting with a slight nod, and then would steal 
away, as if to prevent any further advances. 

Poor fellow ! he was evidently mad — though per- 
fectly harmless ; and the greater part of his time was 
passed in wandering up and down the streets, and 
looking wistfully in the face of every woman he met ; 
as if he expected to find the lineaments of some being 
once dear to him. — But he always turned away with 
a disappointment, truly piteous; and for some time 
afterwards his eyes would be cast on the ground: — anon, 
as some joyous laugh caught his ear, he would again 
raise them, and hasten in pursuit of the beauteous 



* The glass toinb of Belus, which was full of oil, and which when 
once emptied by that bedlamite, Xerxes, could not again be lied — so 
at least 'tis said. — [Vide, the end of the Dictionary passim.] 



178 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

fair one; and having looked her in the face, would 
once more turn away, with that heart-rending sigh. 

At two or three parties where I met him he generally 
sat down in one place, and never moved from it for 
the rest of the evening; but appeared to attend with 
great earnestness to all that passed, — though he took 
part in nothing. — Sometimes, however, when a young 
lady would take her place at the piano — his look 
assumed a sort of expectancy — and he would lean for- 
ward, as if to catch some familiar strain. 

One evening a beautiful girl was pressed to sing ; 
though she each time excused herself with a melan- 
choly smile ; — till at last she acquiesced, and suffered 
herself to be led to the piano: — he viewed this with 
more than his ordinary attention. — But when, after 
running a few plaintive chords, she struck up in a 
broken voice, Bailey's pathetic air — "We met!" — 
uttering a deep sigh, he rose from his seat, and in the 
next moment was at her side, regarding her with the 
moaning look of a bird, peering into its rifled nest for 
its stolen young. — This, then, was the keystone of his 
sorrow — and he was one who had outlived a young 
and first attachment — and these were the strains she 
used to sing him ! 

It was but too true ! — and his story, which I heard 
afterwards, is simple, and may be told in a few plain 
words — indeed any attempt at embellishment would 
spoil it. — It is briefly the following : — 

In his early days, Beverley, (for so I shall call him), 
all youth and feeling, won the heart of a mild, dove- 



THE OLD MAN'S TALE. 179 

eyed girl; — a perfect child of nature — one who was too 
pure to shine in halls of dance and fashion, but was 
formed to be the spirit of a home — a cottage home to 
him who loved her. 

Long they drank enamoured together the draught 
which a first love — the beautiful — the pure — alone 
affords ! — when Beverley, longing to make her his own 
for ever, hastened up to London to win fame and for- 
tune by his talents ; (for the fickle goddess had not 
then given him what she afterwards bestowed) — his 
bosom bounding with proud hopes of rising, and 'ere 
long returning, like the hero of a fairy tale, with a 
star upon his breast, to claim her as his own, his fond 
one ! — But, when did truth and enthusiasm ever meet 
their guerdon ? — In his absence, when all his thoughts 
were of her, and her only — one of those fiends of 
mischief, who have been known to hang like a blight 
o'er affection's flowers, let its poison fall venomed 
into his beloved's ear — whispering, that he was false — 
false to her ! — Oh, God ! that he was so traduced ! — 
But so it was ; and he shortly afterwards received back 
his letters, together with a touching note, written in 
her beautiful hand — a hand which had never before 
blamed him; and which even now chastened its blame 
with much of former sweetness. For her letter only 
briefly touched upon her wrongs — his present change of 
feeling — and then proceeded to wish, that "he might 'ere 
long, find one, who would love him as she had done," 
— and then there was a break — and a farewell for 
ever ! 



180 HUMOUR AND PATHOS 

Half broken hearted Beverley hurried down to 
. But there, although his presence and guiltless 



bearing soon dispelled the doubts that falsehood's power 
liad raised, the mere suspicion that he was false had 
left a scar which his caresses, fond as they were, could 
not heal. 

And one morning, as she sat on his knee — she wept 
— and kissed his cheek — and then, " begged him to 
forgive her all : —but — but, it would be for her happiness, 
that their engagement was broken off/' Pierced with 
grief and amazement, he gave her a look — and then, 
for her happiness was all to him — his own as nothing — 
he clung in her embrace — and breaking from her, and 
oft returning to her soft arms — at last, she looked, and 
he was gone ! 

That night he returned to town, vainly striving in 
change to forget her ; — but to forget ! to such a being 
as Beverley, was impossible ! Every thing — a word — 
a song — a flower, which had been associated with their 
attachment, would constantly rise up and remind him 
of her ; and, at times, he would start in his sleep, and 
fancy she was looking o'er him — her light gold tresses 
falling on his cheek, as they had been wont in other 
days. 

Years passed by in this fruitless endeavour to for- 
get her, who was not to be forgotten ! — when Beverley, 
who had now gained the affluence unsought, which he 
formerly strove to obtain of fortune; — for she, the 
fickle one, is liberal of her favours when the heart has 
no time to enjoy them — no desire to possess them. 



THE OLD MAN'S TALE. 181 

But to return to Beverley: — recoiling from his lot, so 
cheerless and lonely, his heart again yearned to press 
his own — his dear girl — to renew former ties ; — and by 
her fond eyes and kisses to throw a drapery o'er his 
past sufferings, and so forget them all ! But on his 
arrival at her native place, where the twain had walked 
and loved together, so happy and so purely, — he found 
she had left her home, and gone, people knew not 
where. Maddened with wretchedness, he tore himself 
away; and lighting the torch of his despair, like fabled 
Ceres, commenced that search, which was destined 
ever to be in vain ! 

Habit, they say, is second nature, and so it was with 
him; — for although years and disappointments had 
used him sadly, his heart still clung to the fond idea of 
one day meeting with the fair girl, whom he had loved 
so tenderly and truly. What became of her is 
not known : — though it is supposed that she, too, had 
set out to seek for him who sought for her. — And 
thus, each never again met the other. 



PUNS AND PUNNING. 



" Such as take lodgings in a head 
That's to be let unfurnished." 

Hodibras. 



unutterable things ! " 

(Thomson's Seasons. J 



Punning is a science which teaches men how to per- 
vert the meaning of words and phrases; and by a 
dexterous sleight of tongue, make them subservient to 
their own purpose. This art, though very much 
esteemed by some ;* by the generality of the world is 
held in very great abhorrence, and its professors viewed 
with secret fear and distrust. 

That such should be the case is not to be wondered 
at ; as a pun in the mouth of a skilful person, who 
knows the where and the when to direct its point, is a 
very dangerous species of small arm ; and the pos- 

* Videlicet — Swift, Steele, Butler (Hudibras), Shakespeare, 
Foote, Colman (younger), Sheridan, Fox, Byron, Horace Smith. 
Theodore Hook, T. Hood, Sir Jonah Barrington, " cum multis 
aliis," &c. &c 



PUNS AND PUNNING. 183 

sessor of it may not unaptly be compared to the " old 
man of the mountains;"* as he has only to wag his 
tongue, and those who have offended him inconti- 
nently fall victims to the keen dagger of his satirism ! 

The requisites generally considered necessary for the 
obtainment of this liberal science : are, a quick ear ; an 
intuitive sense of the ridiculous ; and a clear percep- 
tion of words sounded alike, though different in ortho- 
graphy and signification. The enemies of the art, also, 
assert that a spice of the Devil is an indispensable sine- 
qua-non: but with this, at present, we have nothing 
to do. 

In its signification, a pun differs from a smart saying, 
or repartee (though it has sometimes been confounded 
with the latter) insomuch as a repartee admits of no 
play upon words ; a pun consists of nothing else.f 
Again, a repartee always bespeaks a certain severity. 
A pun, generally speaking, let the intent of its author be 
what it may — is good humoured. Sometimes, however, 
it happens that the qualities of both are incorporated 
in the repartee ; as in the instance of " Mile. Mars' s 
retort to the Garde du corps," who, upon an occasion, 
subsequent to the restoration of Louis XVIII., hissed 
her as a Bonapartist, as she drove along the streets of 
Paris in her carriage : — " What," said the daughter of 

* " The Old Man of the Mountains. "—Vide Hume's History of 
England — Reign, Richard I. 

t " In short one may say of a pun, as the Countryman said of his 
nightingale : that it is " vox et praeterea nihil," " all sound and nothing 
else."— Addison. 



184 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

Thalia, as she heard the insults of these men, who 
wore their uniform for show and not for service : 
" What ! have the Garde du corps to do with Mars ?" 

But, to proceed : puns are of various sorts, the prin- 
cipal are — the common, or verbal pun ; the nominal ; 
the quotatory ; the heraldic ; and the imaginary, or 
pun by anticipation. 

First, then, the common, or verbal pun ; — of all the 
species this is the most in request, and is easier of con- 
coction than the others (particularly the quotatorypuns) 
which require some classical erudition. Of the verbal 
puns, many examples might be given; we shall, however, 
select one from Bulwer's celebrated novel of " Paul 
Clifford," where the Robber hero goes to the rooms at 
Bath as Captain Clifford ; and on being asked to 
" which of his Masjesty's corps he belonged?" replies, 
" Oh, to the Rifles." The nominal pun, generally 
owes its origin to some such circumstance as the fol- 
lowing — "Ah! Bannister, how d'ye do?" — Bye the 
bye, — have you seen that savage attack of Ebony's this 
month on poor Fitzscribble's poems ? " " No, I have 

not," replies B . " Well, you'll find Blackwood 

somewhere among my papers there." The to-be- vic- 
timized goes to look for it. " Have you found it?" 
"No." "Pshaw! why it stairs you in the face!" 
Howbeit the ' pun nominal," although the most insig- 
nificant of its tribe, is notwithstanding the hardest of 
digestion. For men, let their names be equal in atro- 
city to " Gubbins," or " Huggins," do not like to have 
them taken in vane, or turned for a pun. 



PUNS AND PUNNING. 185 

In the manufacture, or rather Zm^wdfacture of this 
article, little genius is required. It is, therefore, almost 
entirely monopolized by the head masters of public 
schools ; the principals and fellows of colleges ; Ser- 
jeants and corporals of recruiting parties ; and some- 
times by the editors of magazines, in their correspond- 
ing " Notices " to their flunkies : but this is not always 
the case. There is a splendid exception to the con- 
trary in the opening of the ninth canto of " Don Juan." 
Speaking of the " non sine gloria " achievements of 
Wellington, the noble Childe ends by alluding to the 
execution of the " bravest of the brave," Marshal Ney : — 

" Glory like yours should any dare gainsay, 
Humanity would rise and thunder Nay ! (Ney)." * 

Totally differing from the preceding, the quotatory 
pun is perfectly harmless, at least, towards the living ; 
for it never attacks any but those who have departed 
to kingdom come : and of these, poor Shakespeare is 
especially a sufferer: as witness a recent iniquity, 'yclept 
" New Readings of Old Authors." Nevertheless, it is 
a great favourite with many, and when not carried too 
far, is not altogether destitute of agreeableness. As, in 
addition to its native wit ; it calls up passages of authors, 

* Here, I beg to say, that these are Byron's sentiments, not mine : 
— and the above lines were merely introduced as a fair example of 
the pun nominal," and not with any disparaging intention against the 
exalted personage in question. 

God forbid ! I should attempt to pluck any man's laurels from his 
brow ; besides, I should be afraid his might stain my hands. 



186 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

endeared to us by early associations. It is of two 
kinds : viz. the modern and ancient, or classical pun. 
The former is much used by the disciples of Thespis, 
in their conversations, when they desire to be particu- 
larly facetious and shine before strangers. It is also 
thought not unworthy the attention of certain humour- 
ous Novelists: as Mr. Theodore Hook, in his " Sayings 
and Doings " can fruitify unto us : — " Come, are you 
for a stroll?" said Skinner, unwittingly, to the strollers: 
you'll find a pleasant walk in the rookery — that is, if 
you don't dislike the noise." " What noise, sir ? " said 
Mrs. Fugglestone, — 

" The cause — the cause, my soul ! " 

as Othello says," cried Fugglestone. " Exactly so," 
said Skinner, " the caws — that is what I meant." 

The classical pun is the immemorial heritage of 
North Country ushers and poor Welsh curates, who, 
like their prototype, " Parson Adams," possess more 
learning than money, and more wit than either ; and 
who, each sitting by his kitchen fire, surrounded by his 
Penates or household gods (two smoked hams and a 
side of bacon), and his modicum of " childer ;" gene- 
rally " we are seven," and a long serious girl,* by way 
of corporal, to command them, — apostrophises his 
tabby as she responds with husky pur and rampant tail, 
to his caresses : as " Mi-cat inter omnes ! " 

Of the heraldic pun, there are many instances in the 
" British Peerage " exempli gratia? : thus, the motto of 

* " That serious sister." — Barry Cornwall's " Dramatic Scenes. " 



PUNS AND PUNNING. 187 

the Cavendish family is " cavendo tutus." The Fair- 
fax's family, — " fare fac." The Vernons, — " ver non 
semper viret," &c. and many others, which, as our pro- 
vince is more to sing of the " virum " than the " arma," 
we shall not stay to enumerate ; but shall proceed to the 
imaginary pun, which is simply one of the wickedest 
morceaux of wit that ever entered the mischievous 
brain of a schoolboy ; or the most scientific graduate of 
teasing ever planned. The results proceeding from a 
personal intimacy of a sow and her young ones with 
your flower-beds would be perfectly innocuous com- 
pared to what would follow the introduction of one of 
these in a mixed company ! For it is exactly calculated 
to set folks by the ears, and cause present realizations 
of Haynes Bailey's " We met 'twas in a crowd, and I 
thought he would shun me ! " besides duels, horse- 
whippings, separations, Doctors' Commons, breaches 
of promise, and law of libel infuturo ! 

And, indeed, were it ever to come an article of gene- 
ral consumption, lead would advance enormously in 
price : * and, consequently, an eye would be had by spe- 
culators to the heads of certain critics, or the tales of 
certain authors, by way of substitution. Horsewhips 
would become luxuries too great for any but the hands 

* Meaning of course in cost, not in the person of any one of the 
name of Price, as some malicious punster may construe my words. 
I am induced to make this explanation, fearful lest I might be accused 
of the crime of punning, a vice for which I entertain, as my readers 
must be aware, the most Johnsonian abhorrence; and never commit 
it, except for holding it up to the detestation of young persons, as the 
Lacedemonians did their inebriated slaves of old. 



188 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

and backs of the nobility, — and a briefless barrister 
would be a matter of antiquarian conjecture. 

But, for the peace of mankind, a display of it is sel- 
dom hazarded, except by amateurs, and they, like their 
brother faculty, always try their experiments on subjects 
inferior to themselves 'in rank and intellect ; and who 
are not particularly skilled in the use of that weapon 
which the sons of men call a " crabstick." 

The secret of it consists in wilfully misconstruing a 
man's speech, and understanding the very opposite to 
what he intended to express ; and, in the end, making 
him (perhaps some warm-coated guiltless being !) a 
punster in spite of himself. 

For the gratification of the curious in these matters, 
we will give a specimen, which is after this wise : — 
suppose a meeting is convened for considering the ways 
and means of the ' Parish ; ' and the official (Church- 
warden, or Overseer, it mattersoiot which) in giving an 
account of his stewardship, omit to be explicit on 
some pecuniary transaction connected with it : the 
punster then has his cue, and addresses him after this 
fashion — " But, my good sir, you hav'nt told us what 
you did with the money you received from what's-his- 
name's concern ! " The victim, hurt at being suspected, 
will most probably reply in a banter : " You hav'nt, I 
'spose, seen the nice new foot-path that leads to the 
east entrance of the church by they tombstones ?" and 
then triumphantly adds : " what d'ye think I did with 
it ? why I made a way with it to be sure !" " Made 
away with it ! " repliest he wicked rogue, in affected dud- 



PUNS AND PUNNING. 189 

geon, " made away with it ! — well that's too bad ! — but 
you must refund, sir, — but you must refund :" and he 
casts a severe look at the astonished functionary, who 
for ever afterwards, malgre the explanation that ensues, 
is regarded as a second edition of Fauntleroy in black 
smalls and drab continuations ! 

The origin of punning is very ancient. Some authors 
trace its perpetration to the first man Adam ; others, 
like certain Welsh Genealogists, go still further, and 
contend that puns, as well as heads, were cracked long 
before the nativity of the world. With the latter 
Milton appears to agree ; else he would not have placed 
the following crackers (none of the best by the bye) in 
the mouth of his Gentleman in Black, as he chuckles 
over the sensation his cannon has made on the ranks 
of St Michael and his Angels : — 

" And when we 



" To entertain them fair with open front, 

" And breast, (what could we more 1) propounded terms 

" Of composition — strait they chang'd their minds, 

" Flew off, and into strange vagaries fell, 

" As they would dance ; " — 



And, again 



but I suppose, 



* If our proposals once again were heard, 

" We should compel them to a quick result. 

" To whom, thus Belial, in like gamesome mood : 

" Leader ! the terms we sent, were terms of weight, 

" Ofhard contents, and full of force, urg'd home." 

" Paradise Lost.'' 



190 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

Be its origin, however, as it may : if not popular from 
the beginning, its properties were evidently well known 
and cultivated among the Jews ; as, in corroboration, 
we find that our Saviour, who was always willing, as far 
as possible, to concede to the national prejudices — when 
he wished particularly to mark his appreciation of 
Peter's fidelity and faith, makes use of one of these 
tropes of speech, and applies that memorable conun- 
drum which has been handed down as the title deeds of 
St. Peter's patrimony on earth cum heaven to this day : 
" Tu es Petronus," &c. 

Among the Greeks and Romans, too, it was extremely 
fashionable ; and was much in request, and, indeed alto- 
gether " in usum serenissimi Delphi," and other oracles, 
as many a royal blockhead of those days, were he still 
alive, could attest. But its primary approach to any 
thing like maturity was in the reign of Augustus, when 
the wits of that age, Horace, Virgil, Mecsenas, (" with 
whom," as our cousin of " Lincoln's Inn, has it, was 
Cicero,) first began to weave the " humour of its forty 
fancies," and wear it jauntily with their bay -leaves : — 
videlicet, Flaccus's " hunc Regem Jugulas," &c. 

Since their time, malgre, many attempts of Goths, 
Visigoths, and Vandals, to extinguish it, it has been 
gradually progressing: — now, receiving a friendly kick 
onwards from certain Monks and Friars, as they 
scrawled such epitaphs as that on Rosamunda, the 
fair — " non redolet, sed olet, quse redolere solet ! " — 
and now, materially propelled by the exertions of those 
Friar Bacons and Dr. Faustuses, the Astrologers via 



PUNS AND PUNNING. 191 

their predictions, (vide Shakespeare) until it became 
regularly engrafted on the stem of our language by those 
hot-house cultivators of double entendre, Messrs. 
Rochester, Sedley, Grammont, Withers, and Co., in the 
reign of that chaste Joseph Andrews, Charles the 
Second, of blessed and laughter-loving memory. 

Subsequent to his time, it has swelled like the black 
dog in Goethe's "Faust;* and like that cur, it has 
burst and impregnated all ranks with its baneful pro- 
perties. For, at this present epoch, every one perpe- 
trates, from the ' Gold stick ' in waiting, to that leaden 
stick, the author, who is always leave-in^. 

Its queer no meanings grow as plentiful as black- 
berries " on the wig of the judge, and are ever and 
anon, as he sits on the bench, squeezed out " on com- 
pulsion/' with his sentences from his sage mouth. It 
lurks, in the shape of a scriptural quotation, in the 
black covered sermon book of the divine ; and mingles 
kindly with the grains and scruples of the doctor. 
Furthermore, it makes jokes on our entrance into the 
world, and oftentimes sheds its parting gleams of wit 
on our exit — for it frequently causeth the featherbed, 
as well as the " scaffold to re-echo with the jest !" 

Indeed, it has become quite a nuisance ; f and, so 
frequent now are the attempts at pun raising in the 
" Court, camp, church, the vessel, and the mart," that 
if the legislature do not interfere, by bringing in a 

* Mephistophiles first appears to Faustus as a black dog. Vide 
Goethe's Play, 
t Query — new sense ? — Printer's Devil. 



192 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

bill for the ' better preservation of common phrases/ 
the English language will be so twisted and tortured 
by forcings and double meanings, that, after a bit, it 
will have no meaning at all ! Its demoralizing effects 
on the minds of the common people are too obvious to 
need much comment. Already they have learned to 
poize the well turned saying. Already they talk, with 
Tommy Moore, of " warming wit*s stream." Dr. 
Johnson said that he who would perpetrate puns would 
not sneeze to lighten pockets ; but the thing is altered : 
those who formerly picked pockets, now are contented 
to concoct double meanings. 

This state of things is really quite alarming ! As 
long as punning reserved to itself the Inns of Court, the 
Universities, and the Houses of Parliament, it might 
have been tolerated. But now, alas ! " Iliacos intra 
muros peccatur et extra ! " We are become a nation 
of Punsters ! — and, verily, the spirit of equivocation 
has descended on the multitude, and already enrolled 
itself as a member (an acting one !) of the Trades 1 
Unions. 

Thus, if you confer with your carpenter about the 
conception of a bedstead, he meets you from his board- 
ing-house full of " wise saws ; " and when you ask him 
plainly what will " be the probable charge for his job : ** 
he, without being the least abashed, or having the fear of 
his ears being boxed for impertinence, nails you with, as 
you are " an old customer, he shan't stick for a trifle — 
he dare say you will deal." And after all this palaver, 
(as is most likely) should you deem his demand 



PUNS AND PUNNING. 193 

exorbitant, ten to one, but what he, in the spirit of his 
calling, and this prevailing mania, " axes your pardon, 
he wood not offend you for the world." Again, if your 
hair require clipping, you are certain to find the 
Figaro equally imbrued with this incorrigible propensity 
for burking noun substantives ; for, as Horace says, 
" omnibus et lippis notum et tonsoribus esse/' Im- 
mediately as you enter his shaving shop, he, with his 
hereditary snap of the fingers, recommends himself to 
your acquaintance by the strange intimation " that he 
will cut you directly ! " 

Even the tailor, too ! ninth part of a man though he 
be, finds an opportunity, while measuring you for a pair 
of a la modes, for investing his capital of wit in the 
notorious funs aforesaid. Yes, he, the Goose ! without 
more ado, enters the lists of double entendre, confidently 
insinuating that he has " no doubt he'll suit you." 

Besides these examples, it has positively mounted as 
an outside passenger on the ^tage coaches ; and the 
guards, themselves, have "fcenum in cornu." " They are 
devils in garnet!" (meaning incarnate) ejaculated an 
old lady, more remarkable for the severity of her virtue 
than the purity of her orthography, apostrophising, the 
other day, some " frail sisters," as she jolted in the 
basket of one these vehicles aforesaid. " Then they 
must be precious uns ! " leered the dragsman, utterly 
regardless, as Macbeth says, of the " deep damnation of 
his taking off." 

But, perhaps, after all, the most unpardonable ex- 
hibition of this unhappy propensity is at a modern din- 



194 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

ner table ; where letters of mart and reprisal are daily 
taken out against gravity and good sense without the 
least compunction. For it is a miracle, if you sit down 
to the ' plated goods' without some such small talk as 
the following : — A lisping fop, in answer to whether he 
will be helped to some " omelette moelleuse (marrow 
omelet), indubitably replies, with a simper, " as he is 
not married he will take a little ' winsome marrow! ' ' 

Again, an old gentleman, the moral of the " male- 
cat-ape " in Faust, in answer to a similar offer of polite- 
ness with regard to * plum -pudding/ without fail, re- 
sponds (his mouth full of half unmasticated pastry), 
" no, Fm much obliged to you, I am already too pie- 
ously engaged." 

A thousand instances of this punning punishment 
transpire in a " feed " of this nature ; and the affair 
generally terminates by a trio of inveterate ' Diners 
out ' making the inquiry among themselves at whose 
house next " they three shall meat again?" 



BYRON AND HIS BIOGRAPHERS. 



In delineating the character of this remarkable and 
unhappy man, perhaps none who have undertaken the 
task of writing his memoir, (and their name is legion,) 
have given a just, unbiassed estimate ; prejudice and 
exaggeration, romance and common place, being the 
" infames scopulos," on which all his biographers have 
wrecked themselves. Add to this, that one, in his ac- 
count, damns with faint censure, or overlooks altogether 
his vices, on the score of their being the gay, wild, 
chaVtered eccentricities of the talented and the gifted ; 
while another makes his readers cry bitterly, by con- 
stantly instigating the moral bird to crow, when the 
calumniated " Childe " meant any thing but denying 
religion, or virtue thrice ; notwithstanding, that each, 
in the beginning of his undertaking, declared that he 
would 



" nothing extenuate, 

Or set down ought in malice." 

Again, Mr. Moore, in his " Notices," is too prone to 
tint his actions with the brilliant ideal colouring of 
k 2 



196 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

a hero of romance ; for with him he is never George 
Gordon Noel Byron, but alternately, as the subject 
requires it, " Medora's Corsair"—" Lara"—" Man- 
fred " — " Don Juan " — and sometimes a chaos of all. 

Gait, on the other hand, falls into the opposite ex- 
treme, and wilfully forgetting that " his forehead was 
high and pale," and that he was one of those who pos- 
sessed more 

•' than marks the crowd of common men, " 



essays to bring down the princely ether fowl to the 
level of the domestic house sparrow. — " Arcades 
ambo ! " The former uses Byron's life as a child does 
a fiery stick, i. e. to extract some beautiful sparks ; and 
has no scruples of conscience, when he has beat the 
fire away, to heat it again at the flame of his own ima- 
gination. But the latter takes the lighted brand and 
quenches all its fire, without the least compunction, in 
the kettle, which simmers over the kitchen grate with 
his sheep's haggis ! * 

* The above epigrammatic criticism on the historians of the poet 
among lords, and the lord among poets, appeared in the columns of a 
periodical, at the time when the sayings and doings, and " more last 
words," of the baronial bard were, through the " Notices " of Messrs. 
Moore, Gait, Dallas, Hunt, &c. like false teeth, in the mouths of all. 
— And though the lively interest excited by the enthusiastic life, 
poems, and death of this extraordinary and high-minded nobleman, 
has of late somewhat decreased; yet, notwithstanding, any thing 
•onnected in the minutest degree with his memorable " situate 
and being," (as the newspapers write it,) cannot, I should think, 
be received with indifference— even if as brief as the matter in the 
text. 



"NAMES." 
A RHAPSODY IN TWO FYTTES, 



FYTTE THE FIRST. 

" What's in a name?" — Juliet must have been very 
ignorant of the chicanery of this world of ours or her 
pretty pouting mouth would not have uttered this silly 
exclamation ; for we, of every day life, who eat, drink, 
and have no sentimental attachments, know (perhaps 
to our detriment,) that every thing is in that protypeless 
breath — that " vox et preterea nihil," which men call 
a name ; and, moreover, that man's whole being is 
connected with nomenclature, even to satiety ; just as 
the Frenchman of Blackwoodean immortalization, 
found every thing in England, " box." * 

Thus, no sooner is a child born, than all his nominal 
miseries begin. For immediately on notification of 
the event half a dozen old maiden aunts arrive, 

* The " Boxes," a very piquant article which appeared some time 
since in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. 



198 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

en masse, from half a dozen parts of the kingdom, con- 
voked to a back parlour conge d'elire, for the better con- 
sideration of inventing an appellation for the only son 
and heir of Blank Blank, Esq, of Blank, in the county 
of Blank ; and after a prolixious debate, in which the 
poor infant is frightened into hysterics by the ungrate- 
ful physiognomies of these ci devant women ; and in 
which, the nomenology of all the family, from the con- 
queror downwards, has been mouthed, to the utter 
neglect of pronunciation and punctuation ; and each 
particular nomen, proed and conned, for its euphony, 
or the renown of its pristine bearer, they finally vocative 
the "little stranger," by some barbarous and pro- 
nounceless cognomen. 

When the boy can just lisp his infantine understand- 
ing is destroyed by the truly devout papa constantly 
popping the catechetical query, "What is your name?" 
which, when after much toil and trouble, not to mention 
sundry insinuating whippings and manual palpitations, 
he has managed to reply to, incontinently, with all his 
imperfections on his head, he is transported to a public 
school — that multum in parvo, where, 

" in a smaller range, a smaller sphere, 

The dark deformities of man appear." 

There, on his first entrance, he is beset by that cor- 
doroy faction, the school-boys, who in confabulations 
of twenty, and in no gentle voice, demand, " What is 
your name ? " — " answer every man directly " — " ay, 
and briefly"—" ay, and wisely" — " ay, and truly, you 



NAMES. 199 

were best."* When the poor trembling victim hath 
disclosed his denomination, he hath still another ordeal 
to endure — that is the sobriquet, or nick-name, which, 
like certain Irish bogs, adhere to its owner for life. 

Then the calling over of the roll of names, morning 
and evening, and the "condign" infliction on the 
unlucky wight who does not vociferate the customary 
"adsum!" of ubiquity. Now, when he is liberated 
from discipline and trammels of an academus, has he 
any thing more to do with nomenclature ? — To be sure 
he has ! — for, on coming of age, he must needs do the 
civil, and leave his name at the houses of all his gover- 
nor's quiz acquaintance : also must endure the agony 
of being ycleped by these aforesaid quizzes, " young 
what's his name ! " and must finally dine with one 
and all of them, and imbibe execrable turtle soup, and 
champagne of sham pretensions. 

In time, having obtained the cognomen of a " gen- 
teel young man," he falls in love. — Here again, the 
influence of nomenclature ; for the damsel with blue 
eyes and sunny locks jilts him for Cornet Vernon 
Horace, of the guards ; because the appellation of the 
martialist is more consonant than his. 

This disappointment, of course, makes him melan- 
choly, and he looks at the moon, and sings " Oh, no, 
we never mention her ! " and entertains violent thoughts 
of changing his inauspicious nomen. But care killed 
a cat, says the Archaism ; so he solaces himself with 

* Julius Caesar. 



200 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

the pleasures of the town — goes to Crockford's — takes 
up a paper, when, "horribile dictu !" the following meets 
his eye — "What's in a name" — "A poor cottager of 
Ragland, in Monmouthshire, lately christened his 
child, by the euphonious appellation of Rosa Matilda "•* 
— down goes the journal, and out rushes the name- 
haunted ! 

Passing by Drury Lane, he sees a stream of hu- 
manity entering the pit door. He pays his significant 
and follows the current — but as he stumbles into the 
theatre, a voice on the stage proclaims " My name is 
Norval," &c. — it is enough, and, in a trice, he hath 
cleared the door ! Notwithstanding this, however, he 
determines to perilize once more — therefore, we must 
fancy him snugly ensconced in the gallery of the House 
of Commons, and listening to the celebrated Whig 
Nestor, who (declaiming upon the merits of the Reform 
Bill,) f ultimately speaks thus :— * * * * and there 
is no doubt but the bill will finally pass ; for we have 
the sovereign on our side, and the " King's name is a 
tower of strength, which they of the adverse faction 
want ! " — It is needless to say, that he again takes up 
his sky scraper and evades. 

Well, what becomes of him afterwards ? Why, sir, 
perceiving that every thing now-a-days is nominal, he 
chimes in with the prevailing taste, and writes a book. 
But a certain personage, thinking that one of the 

* Fact! 

t When this article was first published the Reform Bill vras in 
agitative discussion. 



NAMES. 201 

" dramatis personam " was designed for him, sends him 
a note, politely inviting him to Hyde Park, or Chalk 
Farm, to have his throat cut, or a ball put cleanly 
through his double-breasted waistcoat, at four o'clock 
in the morning. In this emergency he applies to a 
friend, who, gravely stroking his mustachios, tells him 
he must accept it, else it will be a stigma upon his 
name ! So he goes and remains on the field, a fatal 
and ensanguined example of the influence of names 
on society. 



FYTTE THE SECOND. 

" What's in a name ? " — All, every thing ! Pensions 
are bestowed on names; books are dedicated and sold 
by names; credit is given to names; and mansions and 
statues are erected to names. Cinna, the poet, lost 
his life by his name — Caesar and Alexander conquered 
the world with theirs. Names generally hold the 
noblest and basest offices of a kingdom ; for they are 
indiscriminately kings, generals, pick-pockets, beggars, 
and authors. What is the reform bill — what is liberty 
but a name ? — What are most of the new novels but 
the same ? — Yet great and predominant is the influence 
of nominals. For one half of our petits maitres would 
eschew impertinence, and eat, drink, dress, speak, and 
walk like human beings, if it were not for names being 
k3 



202 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

what they are. While nine tenths of the argillaceous 
race would refuse roast beef and plum pudding, if a 
bad name were conferred upon those truly nutritious 
cates ! 

Then their effect on the sympathies of mankind ! 
Whose breast (it may be a weakness,) beats not with 
extacy, at the mention of merry England's ancient 
chivalry — the Percies and Douglases — those puissant 
names of lordliness, which excused bloodshed, and 
made ambition almost virtue? Whose breast, too, 
heaves not a sigh, to see one like the late Cardinal de 
York — the last of a mighty name — a name which had 
monopolized for centuries the brave, the beautiful, the 
every thing that the world is apt to idolize, dying in 
out-lawry on a foreign shore ? 

And who has not loved one dear name, let it be ever 
so humble, better than any other, and made a shrine 
for it in his memory's heart, and there daily and nightly 
offered the tribute of a sigh — of a tear — to this, the 
nominal goddess of his idolatry ! 

Again, how useful is nomenclature to the novelist in 
composing ! — For when his hero is hard pressed by the 
sword, or infernal machine of his villain, and he has 
no mortal means of rescuing him, except he has re- 
course to diablerie, which, in the present matter of fact 
age, out of prudential regard for the future sale of his 
works, he is adverse to — he has only to introduce a 
third character, and make him whisper in the auricle of 
the villain, a cabalistical name — as it is technically 
called — the weapon drops from the hand of the enemy 



NAMES. 203 

and the hero of the place is thus orthodoxly pre- 
served. 

And, apropos des romans, no author has been more 
inimitably felicitous in the selection of his characters' 
designations than the luminary of Abbotsford; for 
from " Fergus Mac Ivor," down to " Guse Gibbie," 
each is an echo to the sense and natural accomplish- 
ments, or defects of its owner, which there is no mis- 
taking. 

No one, too, has given a finer idea of the uncom- 
promising influence of names than the grandiloquent 
author of the " Rambler," who, speaking of a certain 
potentate, says — " he left a name at which the world 
grew pale, &c. \" — Now, malgre sweet Juliet, there 
must be something very marvellous in a name to pal- 
lidize the world ; as Mother Tellus is generally allowed 
to be of a brunette complexion ; — and as for her being 
physically a coward — it is quite out of the question — 
or the old lady would not have been enabled to brave, 
for so many thousand years, the lurid thunder storms — 
the fell hurricanes, and the crash of elements — to say 
nothing of the many kicks and digs she is daily in^the 
reception of, from the million fools who walk over her 
green apron ! 

Surely, then, the silver swan of Avon's streamlet, 
only meant the question of Juliet's, as the theoretical 
philosophy of a love-sick girl of fifteen, and not to be 
used as a general aphorism, as it now is. For, of a 
surety, there is something in a name ! Else why do 
the soldier — the patriot — the poet — wander far from 






204 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

their " carentes uxores " and little ones ; and relinquish 
their share of the pleasures of life, and give themselves 
up to incessant toil ; provoking perils and the world's 
censure : — if not to obtain &name in their country's an- 
nals, and to be immortalized in their 

" line, 

"With their land's language !" 

And, indeed, lives there the being who would not 
fire the Ephesian fane of his luxury and ease, to have 
his name handed down to posterity as the brave — the 
good — the gifted ! 

Let America — vulgar, romanceless, and un-annalled 
as she is — vaunt her equality of names and stations — 
but let the land of the pale rocks — as long as she can 
boast of her proud and glorious national repository of 
heroes and poets — let her contend that there is some 
thing — even in a name ! 



THE BEST HEART IN THE WORLD. 

A SKETCH OF THE NEW POOR LAWS. 



" put in every hone9t hand a whip, 

To lash the rascal naked through the world, 
Even from the East to the West. " 

Othello. 



Few come into this world as they would wish to come. 
Some make their entrance with a club-foot, and tramp 
all their lives on a peg; some with a hump-back, and are 
immediately, like Charles Grant, and Henry Brougham, 
elevated by their companions to the peerage and 
called "My Lord!" — and some hunt this life in couples: 
videlicet, the Siamese Brothers ; — while some begin 
their first childhood as Milton did his second, i.e. 
" sightless, wanting their visual ray ;" and for the rest 
of their days stand in market places, and upon bridges, 
crying to those who won't hear them, (for people are 
very deaf on those occasions!) to "pity the stone blind, 
deprived o' their blessed Aysight !" 



206 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

Arthur , the hero of this sketch, was saddled 

with none of these embarrassments ; a worse infliction 
marked his entre'e, for he dashed into existence the 
unenviable possessor of the best heart in the world! 
which every one of sense must admit is the most 
grievous dispensation entailed on mortal flesh, — except, 
indeed, its victim has some £10,000 per annum to 
neutralize its baneful effects, — and even then the afore- 
mentioned £10,000 per annum is better without such 
an incumbrance. Reader ! pray that a son of yours 
may never be so awfully visited. Dii avertite omen ! 

The symptomatic signs of this alarming malady — 
(which, thank heaven ! is but of rare occurrence, and 
which, when it does happen, is seldom known to attack 
Prime Ministers, Commissioners, Overseers, and other 
public functionaries ; but, on the contrary, reserves its 
"virus" for the young and very foolish,) — are generally 
a melting eye, — a frequent inclination to stand aside and 
weep, — an unnatural desire to cross the palms of beggars, 
and such like, with five shilling pieces, and other current 
coin of the realm, &c. &c, and in all stages of the 
disorder the unhappy sufferer has a great determination 
of the hand to the pocket. The termination of this 
disease, or vice, for it may be designated either, is 
generally fatal ; and those who continue any length of 
time to give way to its criminal indulgencies will 
ultimately find themselves inmates of one of those pauper 
dungeons, now, somewhat curiously, called " Unions." 

Arthur's first exhibition of this vicious propensity 
was in his nurse's arms, when he allowed her to munch 



THE BEST HEART IN THE WORLD. 207 

his sweetmeats without giving vent to a murmur. At 
five, he had, with the greatest impartiality, distributed 
his playthings among the children of the neighbouring 
labourers. At eight, he gave his dinner to comfort a man 
who bad been engaged in an affair of honour with a horse 
pond, for pillaging a hen roost. At ten, he was the 
recognized almoner of all the paupers in the vicinity. 

At such doings, his father, who was a man of the 
world, was excessively angry, and oftentimes prophecied 
his son would be hanged; but, notwithstanding his 
predictions, the population of the surrounding cottages 
still persisted, as ignorant people will persist, that 
" Master Arthur had the best heart in the world !" 

A public school, which in many instances of this 
troublesome disorder, has proved the most efficacious 
remedy, was duly applied ; but the application had no 
effect on our hero, who continued to exhibit, without the 
smallest mitigation of viciousness, the most alarming 
symptoms. He did "exercises " for half the rebels of the 
establishment ; stood shot for the panes and penalties of 
windows he never broke, and books he never tore ; and 
once, and not once only, went the very unpardonable 
length of begging the second master, who also exercised 
the non sinecure office of Regius Professor of Birch, to 
let him suffer " condign," instead of the acknowledged 
culprit, because the said culprit, to use his own words, 
" was so very small \" The disciplinarian, struck with 
the unusual audacity of his demand, officially acquiesced; 
and in so doing, threw out strong hints that he con- 
sidered him no better than an idiot. His schoolfellows, 



208 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

however, in his justification, though they allowed he 
might be a little cracked, or so, declared he had " the 
best heart in the world!" 

This account of his scholarship gave his father much 
uneasiness, and would probably have given him more, 
had he not cherished the false idea, that as he grew 
older he would mend ; but when he saw his son arrive 
at years of discretion, without his being distinguished 
by any manly feats of duelling, seduction, and other 
achievements in " usum studiosse juventutis " of the 
present age, he took to his bed, and died a broken- 
hearted man, 

Our hero, now left to his own sole guidance and 
disposal, daily increased in wickedness, and grew worse 
and worse, — went bond for bankrupts, — lent various 
sums of money to men who had no ostensible means of 
ever repaying it, — gave unremittingly clothes, food, and 
pecuniary assistance to all who were distressed, — and 
so great was his characteristic infatuation, that he 
was once caught in the very act of transferring his 
own coat to the shoulders of an Irish beggar woman, 
with three small children, and a sick husband, 

After this disgraceful proceeding, his real friends of 
course cut him; and his uncle, a very worthy old gentle- 
man, was so enraged, that he immediately made a new 
will, and nominated as his heir a distant relation, a young 
man of great promise, who although hardly twenty, had 
already nobly signalized himself in the " humanities" by 
seducing two very pretty girls, — and one under promise 
of marriage. 



THE BEST HEART IN THE WORLD. 209 

It will possibly not be believed, but such is the 
depravity of human nature, that there were not wanting 
those — to be sure, they consisted mostly of individuals 
whom he had lent money to, or otherwise assisted — 
who still upheld him in his turpitude, and were not 
ashamed openly to declare, that he possessed the "best 
heart in the world!" 

The prosperity of guilt is proverbially of short dura- 
tion, — and about this time, on winding up his accounts, 
our hero found himself comparatively ruined. In this 
dilemma, not at all abashed, he proceeded to invoke 
the assistance of those who had been his associates in 
his unrighteousness ; in other words, who had borrowed 
his five pound notes, and drunk his cherry brandy. 
But to do them all justice, they now, with one accord, 
drew back, and refused to hold communion with a 
reprobate so thoroughly vitiated; while, when he called 
on others, either from their front doors being locked, 
and the key by some unseen calamity not to be 
found; or that the indwellers had run down for a 
month or six weeks to the sea side, he never could 
obtain admittance. 

This meritorious conduct of his former friends, it is 
said, cut him to the heart, and he had the weakness to 
talk of ingratitude, — ingratitude indeed ! as if any 
faith were to be kept with a wretch who had given 
away the coat from his back, and set at defiance all 
the rules of civilized society ! 



210 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

It was some years afterwards, when one December 
evening, as the snow shower fell thick, and the cold 
winds blew bitterly, that in the streets of the metro- 
polis, a beggar, very audaciously, having no home, or 
settled place of abode, was seen to block up the pave- 
ment by standing shivering unseemly in the sleet. 
He had stood for some time in this way, offending the 
moral pedestrians, and still more moral charioteers, who, 
instead of standing still, religiously rode in their car- 
riages, when a police man very properly ordered him to 
move on ; he did a few steps, and then had the incon- 
ceivable villany to fall down exhausted, and thereby 
very nearly splashed the nether garments of Lord John 
R 's butler, as he was entering the splendid estab- 
lishment of Messrs. & — , Silversmiths, to 

expedite the completion of his noble master's order for 
a new service of richly embossed plate. 

The indignation of the passers by, as might have 
been expected, was excited, and the atrocious miscreant 
was directly given in charge to the police, and subse- 
quently taken to Marlborough Street. The sitting 
Magistrate before whom he was brought, happened 
however, to be a weak man, and not at all read in the 
new doctrines of pauper economics ; for upon hearing 
the statement of the case, he insisted that the overseers 
should admit the prisoner to the run of the workhouse. 
But the highly respectable functionaries in question 
were not to be trifled with ; although, to humour the 
" beak," they allowed the fellow to enter the pauper 
sanctuary, but it was only to turn him out five minutes 



THE BEST HEART IN THE WORLD. 211 

afterwards at a back door, in obedience to their "written 
instructions."* 

Thus, deservedly, and according to Act of Parliaments 
for two days and two nights did this wretched being 
creep up and down the streets and thoroughfares, 
without tasting a morsel of food, save the filthy- 
garbage which, in co-partnership with the dogs, he 
managed to pick up from the adjacent sewers, — though 
everywhere his red and wolfish eye was wronged with 
the sight of heaps of provisions lying useless in the 
windows of the many shops and eating-houses, — till at 
last, abused nature gave up the ghost, and he finished 
his criminal career of poverty, by feloniously allowing 
his breath to depart on the steps of Mr. Commissioner 

's house, just as that gentleman was in the act of 

uncorking his third bottle of chateau margaux, " neat as 
imported." Yes, the best heart in the world, for it was 

Arthur , met a due reward for his iniquities, and 

died of want in the streets of London ! 

* The circulars, or " written instructions," of the Commissioners 
transmitted by those benevolent gentlemen, to the respective and 
respectable " Guardians," throughout the queendom, as vade mecums 
for then- future conduct ; and to prevent them from evincing any 
exhibitions of unseemly weakness, &c, in the discharge of their official 
duties, 

f The meritorious New Poor Bill. 



MRS. WATKINS'S PARTY. 



" Avaunt ! inexplicable guest ! Avaunt ! 

Intrusive presence ." 

Wordsworth's "Dion* 

Reader ! ' an ' you would not be canonized as 
a martyr, and regularly Monsieur Tonsoned by the 
whole humanity for the space of twelve calendar 
months, inclusive of Sundays ; — never go to a pro- 
vincial party, except you are, as Hamlet says, '• a native, 
and to the manner born "where the catastrophe occurs: 
— for take my word, (I speak from experience,) it is the 
gathering twanky place, and universal queen-cake focus, 
of all the counter attractions, male and female in-dwelling 
round about ; not to mention, that at such an extrava- 
ganza, volunteering their respective parts of " Mons. 
Marquis ," and "Billy Bluster," axe to be met every trans- 
ported refugee, and erratic black-guard, there for a time 
sojourning ; who, perchance through their inability to 
settle their shots, have shot off in a tangent from their 
own spheres. 

Therefore, knowing the consequences which will 
inevitably await on such an indiscretion ; let not the 
usual representations of a friend, — " fine girls " — 




"afiiiuj :/;,>/,, 






MRS. WATKINS'S PARTY. 213 

"plenty of wine" — &c, tempt you to perilize, at 
least without first taking out a writ of " ne injuste 
vexes," as a precautionary measure against the after 
violent, civility assaults of those you may chance to 
meet there. 

The above advice is the off-pairings resulting from 
experience, as you will hear. — Being once staying with 
an old college chum, in the provincial and exceedingly 

quiescent town of ; it so happened, that during 

my visit, a Mrs. Watkins, (whose soul God assoilize!) 
had the extreme temerity to let her wits and her house 
out (for one evening only,) as show rooms for the dis- 
play of her neighbours' white satin slips, kid gloves, 
and subsequent ridicule : — in country patois, she gave 
a dance. And, among others, my friend received one 
of her semi-square notices of invitation, requesting, in 
the approved terms of asking, '• the pleasure (pleasure 
indeed) of his, and his friend's company," (meaning 

mine.) 
V 
At first, calling to mind, two or three not very 

flattering descriptions of such " party doings," which I 
had read, when "juvenile and curly," in Hook's novels, 
I determined to decline going ; but, at the instigation 
of my friend, in an evil hour. I was induced to accom- 
pany him, and went. The party, overcharged and* 
vulgar in.the extreme, exhibited, like most other parties, 
that is in the country, — a great superfluity of bustle, 
whispering and loud laughter on the part of the quasi 
ladies ; and a great scarcity of chairs and coffee for the 
parts of the quasi gentlemen ; together with the amusing 






214 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

contretems of the man engaged for the night, (from the 
neighbouring barber's,) to hand about the "refresh- 
ments," (for so they glorify at such displays, their sugar 
and water — half and half negus, and their currants and 
dirt — half and half cake.) 

But not to anticipate. On entering my cloak 
was received at the bottom of the stairs by the maid 
in waiting, and myself at the top by the mistress ; 
who, in a yellow turban, crowded to the echo with 
artificial clover, wrung my hand over and over again, 
protesting all the while the pleasure it gave her to see 
me, and then passed me, like a bad half-crown, to 
undergo the same process at the hands of her three 
daughters and their brother Tom ; the last-mentioned 
personage being six feet in height, with interest, 
and a Punchinello nose.* 

Well, I subsequently, in my own defence, danced, 
"took steps," as the six and eight-penny people say, with 
two-thirds of the young ladies up stairs ; and lost my 
money, and the equanimity of my temper, with two- 
thirds of the old ones down. This, together with 
swallowing a decoction yclept " made wine," between 
the " heats," whiled away the time until the rare 
entrance of the " trays," and the frequent yawning of 
the waiters, warned the company to scramble that 
finishing scufne, " Sir Roger de Coverley, " and depart. 

* For further particulars concerning this sort of fulcrum, vide 
the description of the nasal organs of Bardolph, Sancho's brother 
Squire, and the Stranger, in Tristram Shandy. Proby, too, has 
described this species of " nasus " very faithfully, when he says, * I 
have a nose." 



MRS. WATKINS'S PARTY 215 

Thus ended the affair, but not its consequences, — at 
least to me, — and as I drew on my cloak, I heard our 
hostess, from the landing, exclaim, — " Mary, is the 
Musicianei % s gone V "Iss mum," replied the hand-maid. 
Then dout them lights in the dancin' room." 

Truly has it been said, that we tread on concealed 
fires,* and that mishap is always ready to "burst," as 
poor Keats has it, "joy's grape against his palate fine!" 
for the next morning, as I walked out, little dreaming 
what was in store for me, to "exorcise" the rising 
spirits which I had imbibed the night before, look which 
way I would, I was every where greeted as if I had 
been my Lord Mayor, or some such Tom Fool, with 
" nods, becks, and wreathed smiles," by those who 
passed. " Devilish free, however," thought I, but they 
must evidently have met me somewhere, perhaps last 
night, at " Mrs. Watkins's Party ;" so, walking on, I 
comforted myself that it would not happen again. 
But never was man more mistaken ; for each time 
I ventured out, I was so bowed at, and my hand shaken 
by those who had, as they expressed it, " the honour 
of making my acquaintance, the other evening, at 
Mrs. Watkins's Party," that I was in a fair way of being 
shaken to death, and a verdict returned, " died by the 
visitation of too much civility, administered by persons 
unknown ! " And to such a pitch was this carried, 
and so great was the determination of recognition to 

* " Incedis per ignes suppositos cineri doloso." 

Horace. 



216 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

my unfortunate self; that if I chanced to look at a shop 
window, there was sure to be a male thing bowing to 
me behind the counter, who, of course, grounded his 
intimacy on the strength of having met me at Mrs. 
Watkins's Party ; or if I happened to turn my eyes 
towards a house, again there was sure to be a female 
thing in the attic, shaking her curls at me, who doubt- 
less, also, had danced " that sweet cottage dance " with 
me at Mrs. Watkins's Party ! While, if I entered a 
fruiterer's, or confectioner's, the owners constantly 
recommended their wares to my attention by telling me, 
that " they were just the same as those which Mrs. 
Watkins had of them for her party." 

Nor did my strange, unheard-of notoriety, associated 
as it always was with the name of " Watkins/' end 
here : — would that it had ! — on the contrary, it was 
continually rising, like a spectre in my path, and 
haunted me everywhere, even in the penetralia of my 
friends parlour : for, on one occasion, admiring a pair 
of elegant cut decanters, and remarking that I thought 
" I had seen some like them some where." " Oh ! 
very likely," replied my friend's wife, with a quiet smile; 
" for I lent them to Mrs. Watkins, for her party." — ! 

But this eternal now of that omnipresent party was 
to be borne no longer ; already it preyed upon my 
spirits, and, at times, chairs, tables, and all, seemed to 
bend to me, as if they too had seen me at Mrs. 
Watkins s Party, while, of a night, the most horrid and 
ghastly phantoms approached me in my sleep, and 
seizing my hand in their skinny fists murmured, as the 



MRS. WATKINS'S PARTY. 217 

worms fell from them : * — " knows't thou not us ? 
we met thee at Mrs. Watkins's Party ! " 

There was no bearing this ; so at last, bidding adieu 
to my friend and his amiable wife, I took my place on 
the " Champion " coach, for London, hoping to dissi- 
pate the sickly fancies that enveloped me, by change of 
scene. But, as ill luck would have it, near Northleach 
we were overtaken by a violent storm of hail, and I 
was fain to seek shelter in the inside : on entering, I 
stumbled over the legs of a fat old lady, surrounded by 
a detachment of bundles and baskets, to whom, of 
course, I tended the customary apologies : — but what 
was my alarm, I may say horror, when the incarna- 
tion in question, hailed me by my name, — not as " the 
bride of another," videlicet " Haynes Bayley," — but 
as one, with whom she had the " honour of playing 
whist at Mrs. Watkins's Party!' 7 "The devil take 
Mrs. Watkins's Party ! " muttered I ; and the next 
moment, it is needless to say, I had resumed my old 
place on the " box," with Coachee, leaving her of the 
interior to wonder " what had scared me away :" — 



Dost fear? dost fear, the moon shines clear, 
Dost fear to ride with me ? " 



Every thing mortal has its end, — its goal, — and 

* " The worms they crept in, and the worms they crept out." 

The Monk. 
And Constance says in King John, invoking "amiable lovely 
death :" — " And ring these fingers with thy household worms." 

L 






218 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

coaches have theirs, so at last I was put down at the 
" Bolt in Tun," Fleet Street. But I had scarcely domi- 
ciled myself in the coffee room ten minutes, before I ob- 
served the waiter regarding me very attentively, and this 
every time he entered the room. What could it mean ? 
Surely, he did not mistake me for some enterprizing 
Dando, who had lately done business with their house, 
according to the Pistolian creed, of " base is the slave 
who pays \" But he soon put me right on that score, 
by coming up with a simper and a glass cloth, and " I 
beg pardon, sir ; hope no offence ; but isn't your name 

B ? " I assented : " ah ! I thought I knew your 

face, sir ; " continued he of the glass cloth : " you were at 

Mrs. Watkins's Party, of H , one evening, when I 

waited there." — Thunder and lightening ! Had the 
ghosts of all the bullocks, of whose flesh from my youth 
upwards I had tasted of, confronted me in horned 
array, I could not have felt more horrified and 
astonished. — What ? and had the rumour of that 
accursed " at home," travelled astride upon a broom- 
stick, all the way from H up here? and was I 

never to be freed from its persecution ? — the thought 
was madness, — I could have knocked the wretch down ; 
but I did a much wiser thing, I ordered my luggage to 
another inn, thinking thereby, to avoid any further 
annoyance; but, there I reckoned without my host ; for 
the next day, as I was sauntering in St. James's Park, 
near the site of Carlton Palace, — thinking of Sheridan, 
the Prince, and all those who once sunned its walls,* — 

* I never view the " hie jacet," of Carlton Palace, and think 



MRS. WATKINS's PARTY. 219 

I was clapped on the back from behind, and the next 
moment my hand was seized by an impudent, oily- 
faced, biped, in a green coat, and top-boots, — "how 
d'ye do old boy?" I coolly withdrew my hand, and 
suggested there must be some mistake : " not in the 
least," cried the brute ; " T know you very well ; I had 
the honour of taking wine with you at Mrs. Watldns's 
Party!" 

It would be in vain to enumerate all the repeated 
sublimations of this sort which I subsequently under- 
went. One, however, as it was more humiliating, and 
temper-trying, than the rest, — seeing that it transpired 
in a crowd when all eyes were upon me, — I will 
mention : — 

It happened during my stay in town, that among 
other play-houses, I visited the "Old Bailey,'' to see the 
farces, which, under the name of "trials," are periodically 
acted there. Having paid my entrance fee (for money 
is taken there at the doors, as at other theatres,) 
I entered the court just at the moment that the prisoner 
at the bar (who I found afterwards was a clerk, who 
had embezzled the property of his employer) was 
calling witnesses to speak to his character. 

The culprit in question no sooner saw me, than pointing 
with his finger he exclaimed : "and that gentleman there, 

of its brilliant, but heartless, possessor, without recalling those 
beautiful lines in " Ohilde Harold" — 

" Here didst thou dwell, — here schemes of pleasure plan, 

But now, as if a thing unblest by man — 
Thy fairy dwelling is as lone as thou !" 
l2 



220 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

will speak for me, for he knows me very well!" As 
the school boy has it : — 

" Obstupui, steteruntque comae ! " 

and I regarded him, much to the amusement of the spec- 
tators, with a look of mingled contempt and horror: — 
" is hell at work, or dost thou rave ? " — " come, you 
will say a word for the young man, won't you?" here 
interposed the delinqent's counsel, in the very insinua- 
ting tone of those who practise the law : " say a word," 
re-echoed I ; " I never saw him in all my life !" " Oh 
yes you have," exclaimed the prisoner ; " for I was your 
vis a vis with Miss Arabella Jenkins, at Mrs. Watkins's 
Party ! " — Regardless of the expostulations of the 
prisoner and his counsel, and the derision of the crowd, 
— to seize my hat, and rush from the scene, was the 
work of an instant, and, as I retraced my steps to my 
lodgings, I determined to put an end to this unbearable 
system of annoyance for the future. " And pray, sir, 
how did you manage that? " "Why, sir, I'll tell you : " 
— in my way homewards, I purchased a heavy twig of 
crab -tree, and every time I thought I discovered any 
inclination to be " hail, fellow, well met," I brandished 
it in a very significant manner, which had the desired 
effect ; for up to this present time I have never been 
troubled with any inordinate symptoms of recognition. 
But, nevertheless, recalling, as it naturally must, 
past disquietude, T never hear the name of " Watkins" 
without a shudder ; and I should very much advise those, 



MRS. WATKINS'S PARTY. 221 

who look to be remembered in my " will," to take 
care not to pronounce that nomenclature too often, 
otherwise their chance of a " post obit" will be very 



THE DRINKING PARTY. 

(a sketch.) 



Look at those men sitting in joyous conviviality 
around that mahogany table, whose surface shines 
" splendidior vitro." They look so happy, that there 
is a fear lest their felicity should be too exquisite to 
last ! They appear to infuse Paradise into their hearts 
with every glass of the " coal black wine " that they 
quaff. How their eyes dance one to another in sym- 
pathy ! How lucid their conversation flows ; plente- 
ously intermingled, however, with the rocket-like 
brilliancy of the repartees — the " palpable hits " of the 
puns — and the merry cachinnation excited by the bon 
mots. 

These, surely, give the lie to Solon ; for they are 
happy, though deathless ! 

Here, methinks, the shade of Solon whispers in my 
ear — " Mortal ! be not too hasty — they will pay me a 

tribute of justification by and bye I" * 

* * * * * * * 

Oh ! the confusion of languages ! Babel's confabula- 



THE DRINKING PARTY. 223 

tion was only the conversation of a modern soiree, 
compared with this ! And hey, what a crash ! "Why, 
they are exterminating the bottles and wine glasses ! 
Hollo ! take heed, or that old gentleman in the Brutus 
wig will upset the side table of porcelain and bijou- 
terie ! 

Alas ! the precaution was useless ! " The deed is done 
— did you not hear a noise ? " — and he hath cut the 
ten commandments with marked distinctiveness on his 
cheeks. " Sir, don't take that ! it is the vinegar cruet : " 
— he hath swallowed it without the fear of cholera be- 
fore his eyes ! 

But, bless our souls ! where are the rest ? There 
they lie and grovel, extended on the Turkey carpet, 
crying, bellowing, and disputing, like naughty boys, 
when the nurse refuses to grant their modest demand 
for the luminary of the " stilly night." " Oh ! that 
men should put an enemy into their mouths to " 

Here my soliloquy was cut brief by the entrance of 
Solon's sprite, who, with a great deal of malice pre- 
pense, shouted out — " These, surely, are happy, though 
deathless ! " ha ! ha ! ha ! * * # 



GENIUS AND AUTHORS. 



Oli ! had the venerable matron thought 
Of all the ills by talent often brought ; 
Could she have seen me when revolving years- 
Had brought me deeper in the vale of tears ; 
Then had she wept, and wish'd my wayward fate 
Had been a lowlier — an unletter'd state." 

(Kirke White.) 



Nothing exalts and purifies mankind more from the 
grovellingness of their pursuits, and prepares them in a 
greater degree for a future immortality, than Genius. 
Yet, strange as it may seem, no class of men have been 
more spitefully entreated than the sons of song. For sel- 
dom, or ever, have their labours been sufficiently appre- 
ciated, or their worth sufficiently acknowledged. 

Indeed, on the other hand, they have been uniformly 
neglected and calumniated, and their lives made un- 
happy and full of bitters, as the annals and tombstones 
of every nation too often certify ! But, perhaps, their 
greatest curse is not to be understood ; for there is an 



GENIUS AND AUTHORS. 225 

•* esse quam videri " about Genius, which the world 
cannot, or will not, understand. Even Nature 
apparently does not understand it, or else she would 
not so constantly mar and vex it with corporeal de- 
formity. 

People are too prone to think that the life of a 
genius is a calm, contemplative, bright existence, — free 
from labour — free from anxiety ; and that a man so 
blessed sports over the waters of taste and intellect like 
a sparkling Ephemeron, and, when sated, retires to the 
abandonment of a bed of sweets : — 

" Whose roughest part 



Is but the crumpling of the roses." 

But, heavens ! how are they mistaken ! No life 
is more arduous, and more replete with troubles, 
than an author's. What the hardest manual labour 
is to the body, his exertion is to the mind ; with this 
material difference : that he has not the sweet re- 
pose, the gay unbending of the soul, which always 
succeeds the fatigues of the artizan, nor the holidays ; 
for his mind never ceases from its slavery ; it has no 
sabbath ; but is ever at a perpetual treadmill, turning 
a wheel " never ending, still beginning," till the ma- 
chinery, exhausted, snaps by dint of very exercise 
alone. In answer, it may be averred, he has the 
fame, the " monstrari digito," the triumphal arch, 
the " snug lying in the abbey," to solace his troubles, 
which the day labourer has not. It is very true; 
he sometimes has, and sometimes — often — has not; 
l3 



226 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

but what are these when taken into consideration for 
happiness ? 

What is fame to the " tranquil mind?" What the 
triumphal arch to the brow of the lovely wife, curving 
into gladness at her husband's nightly return from toil ? 
What the tardy monument to the little grave, yearly 
decked by affection with pure field flowers ? And, oh ! 
it is better to be the oracle of a little village circle, than 
the Delphi of, perchance, an admiring, though always 
envious and callous, world ! 

Much, too, has been said of Byron's existence, — that 
his life was a splendid rocket one, — a continual flood of 
glory, — a present immortality on earth ! * It was so ; 
but was it a happy one ? On the contrary, was there 
not more of the headlong, mountain fall in it, than the 
calm stream ? If we review his brief existence, and 
take from it its modicum of popularity, there will re- 
main little to envy ! Fatherless from his infancy, and 
it might be said, motherless ; as that parent never ex- 
hibited much maternal feeling towards him, but often 
twitted him with his deformity, which circumstance he 
touchingly refers to in one of his after productions ; 
and, indeed, his whole existence, without enumerating 
his blighted affections, his conjugal infelicity, and 

* The Noble Bard has pretty significantly, in his Childe Harold, 
told at what price he purchased that " glory " and " immortality ; " 
when describing his prototype, or more properly, himself, he says — 

" his desire 
Was to be glorious ; 'twas a foolish quest — 
The which, to gain and keep, he sacrificed all rest !" 



GENIUS AND AUTHORS. 227 

his exile from his " native land/' may be summed 
up in two sentences, — a broken heart and an early 
tomb ! 

Again, authors are looked upon as a strange out of 
the way sort of people, whose occupation is altogether 
to write and utter smart sayings ; and as beings that have 
only to take up their pen to indite, and lo ! a book 
proceeds troubleless from their quills, like Minerva, 
ready armed from the ambrosial head of Jove." It is 
very well ; they must endure this too ; but, oh ! 
men know not what goes to the composition of a single 
page, much less a book. How many times the head 
must ache, — how many vigils by the midnight oil must 
be kept, — how many times the imagination must be 
drained, — how many times the mind's cords must 
be strained, till, like an overtuned lute, they almost 
burst, ere a literary work is finished: and when 
finished, — not they, but the bibliopolist, reaps the har- 
vest : their portion is the heartless cutting up of the 
critics — fellows who deal out judgment by rule and 
measure ; and the dissatisfaction (which has happened 
before now) of being swindled out of the very credit 
of their handywork and soul's throes, by an im- 
pudent pretender's palming on the public a manu- 
script craftily prepared with interlineations and blots 
of the same.* 



* Alluding to a certain plagiarist's barefaced attempt thus to 
defraud Makenzie out of his interest in the copyright of his " Man 
of Feeling," — for further particulars of which affair, see the life of 
that celebrated author. 



228 



HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 



Should it, however, escape the hands of the critic 
and plagiarist — in a word, should it take, — why its po- 
pularity hardly outdures the time that was consumed 
in correcting it for the press ,• particularly if it be of the 
lighter cast of literature, poetry, and romance. For 
these, the learned man, who has the reputation of being 
wise, (but who, in reality, take away the patois of the 
schools, is the greatest fool of the whole species,) de- 
spises, as too puerile, too vain a study for one like him, 
whose whole time is gloriously frittered away in dis- 
covering, or confusing, the different significations of 
Greek particles, and the multifarious readings of a line 
in Euripides. 

And after all, the man of genius has the mortification 
of beholding the work, which closely employed him for 
years, thrown carelessly upon the table of a boudoir, only 
to be taken up by a belle, or an exquisite, at a morn- 
ing call ; and at the few moments that immediately 
precede the dinner larum ; — or to be apathetically 
turned over by the fingers of a lisping coquette, when 
her adorable is stammering forth his denouement of love ; 
or when she wanders in " green fields," as an apology 
to others and to herself for so doing ! Why literary 
men have been, and are, thus situated and entreated, 
can be accounted for in no other way than, that genius 
was never designed — never framed for this sublunary 
orb ; but, by some neglect of the powers that be, sent 
here in mistake, instead of to its native and rightful 
empyreal sphere ; and the world, or the argillaceous 
atoms and straws that compose its system, are fully 



GENIUS AND AUTHORS. 229 

aware that they do not deserve it ; in fact, that they 
have no right to it: hence proceeds their treatment 
of it. But, like some notable housewife of the 
" Winifred Jenkins " class, who receives a present at 
Christmas, though not meant for her, but for some other 
sister dowager of the same nominal recognizance — 
wisely determines (honest soul !) to accept the goods 
the Gods provision her, — so with them, — and like the 
aforesaid housewife, they agree to pluck all its plumes, 
that it may not be recognised, should the real owner 
call for it; and to eke out our resemblance, finally 
immerge the victim in the boiling reservoir of po- 
pular hatred and neglect. When the turkey, 
fowl, duck, hare, &c, is consumed : the chroni- 
cler of small beer and smaller qualifications praises 
its exquisite flavour and pretty picking; and pro- 
claims aloud, to her friends and neighbours, the 
justice it did to her cuisine, — vice versa, when the 
bard, or author, dies : the world, for the first time, 
— the very same douce world, mind, gentle, and dis- 
criminating reader, who had a few months before, 
quietly seated by its sea-coal fire, and tippling its brandy 
twist, without exhibiting any marks of sympathy or 
commiseration, beheld the last blanket of the suffer- 
ing defunct, snatched by a bum-bailiff from his bed 
of sickness, — this world, sagacious orb ! now begins 
to find out that he (the deceased) was exceedingly 
clever ! — remarkably gifted! — talents of the first water ! 
&c. &c, and in the end proceeds, with all its might 
and main, to open subscription lists, erect monu- 






230 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

ments, and indite eulogies to his broken heart and 
memory ! * 

Too many of Thought's pale cheeked children have 
felt the summary severity of this Lidford law — this in- 
human process which hangs first and opens its court of 
judicature afterwards : from the 

" sleepless boy that perished in his pride ! " 

to him, whom he of the Emerald isle describes in his 
burning minstrelsy " to have run over each chord of 
the lyre, and was master of all ! " 

But besides the world and its ingratitude, the man 
of genius has another enemy to combat with, — it is 
himself! For it is a question, — so radically unfit is 
genius to inhabit an earthly dwelling, if the world and the 
world's men went smooth with him ; and if he were free 
from the supercilious contumely of the proud and 
wealthy, — and were spared the chiliad of scoffs and 
scorns that high-souled merit is daily in the reception 
of from the unworthy crowd, and those who, snugly and 
ignorantly satisfied with themselves and their capa- 
bilities, " know not Joseph," — it is a question, I make 
repetition, whether he would be happy ? As there is 
a spice of perilous stuff called sensibility in the interior 



* " How proud they can press to the funeral array 

Of him, whom they shunn'd in his sickness and sorrow ; 
How bailiffs may seize his last blanket to-day — 
"Whose pall shall be held up by nobles to-morrow !" 

Moore's Monody on Sheridan. 



GENIUS AND AUTHORS. 231 

composition of one of these gifted beings, which is for 
ever counteracting, by its iEolian moanings, his ad- 
vances towards felicity, both by its being unwittingly 
jarred upon by the common herd, and by the posses- 
sor's own never ceasing playing upon it ; and so dan- 
gerous, yet dulcet, is this ingredient, that it eventually 
destroys its victim by its mere piquancy alone, who 
may be said to die 

" Upon the lute, whose sweetness broke his heart ! " 



OUR VILLAGE; 



OB, 



THE WANDERER'S RETURN. 



" All ! All ! are fled ; yet still I linger here ! " 

Rogers. 



Poor Biron ! was this thy welcome home 



" Isabella." 



Our village ! what music there is in those words ! — 
what a charm ! The innocence — the sunshine — the 
yellow primrose-— the blue violet — the white cottage — 
the first love of youth, — all are in those two simple 
words — our village. 

Their power over the heart is unbounded. They 
are the " Crean Tarigh;" or fiery cross of the High- 
land Chieftain, at whose call the sympathies of 



OUR VILLAGE; OR, THE WANDERER'S RETURN. 233 

all — the young — the old — the lawless — the ambitious, 
— rise up, ready armed, and take possession of the 
heart, by driving out every grosser feeling which 
time, circumstance, or interest, had made to settle 
there. 

Thus, the old querulous Sexagenarian, whom age and 
imfirmities have metamorphosed into a mere caricature 
of what he was, — being now naught else but a mass of 
apathy ; and so lean and withered withal, that he is 
scarcely able to keep his bones warm 

H in the dun night-gown of his own loose skin,"— 

yet, when he hears the scene of his boyhood men- 
tioned — in ecstacy he will throw away his snuff, which 
he uses to titillate the only sense now left him ; and, 
forgetting his cough, half real, half imagined, he will 
begin to " babble of green fields ! " and will again be a 
boy in his native place, among his early friends and 
companions ! 

In like manner, the being who has risen high above 
his fellow men, and above ambition's wildest flights, 
and his own youthful imaginings — whose name is on 
the lips of the beautiful — the illustrious — the gifted of 
his country ; and whose fame, History is preparing her 
finest pen to immortalize — his bust being already in 
every library — his portrait in every album — yet, demi- 
god as he is, there will be moments when he will feel 
his greatness a mockery ; and he will sigh for the vil- 
lage girl, who formed the " smiles, the tears," of his 



234 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

youthful years, and the white cottage with its garden 
of roses, where he was born. 

The man of business, too, in whose mean bosom no 
voice but that of profit ever spoke, forgets the usual 
stinginess and petty exaction of his calling when he 
sees some countrymen of his own village enter his shop ; 
and to them he will vend his wares cheaper than to 
any others. While of a Sunday, hiring an Irish car, he 
will drive his wife and children over, to inspect the 
place of his birth, and as he beholds the calmness of 
the secluded nook, inwardly vows, when he has amassed 
the desired plum, that he will retire there, and never 
deal out tea or sugar more. 

Again, even in the man of crime — they ask remem- 
brance, and have their claim allowed ; — for in the still- 
ness of night, when all, save this bruised worm and his 
Maker, are bound in slumber, he sees, or thinks he 
sees, a hand writing on his prison walls. Starting, he 
reads the name of his native plains, where he had once 
been so virtuous and happy ! It operates like a 
wizard's spell, and he, who was before a moody and 
sullen man, now sinks a martyr to repenting tears, and 
weeps. — Yes ! the man of blood weeps — as it were a 
little child ! And should a stern policy demand the 
mockery of exposing the lifeless head, in addition to his 
execution — he will pray — he will entreat — that it may be 
placed so that, even after death, he may look upon the 
blue hills and emerald meads of his own dear village ! * 

* " The mummery, too, of exposing the senseless head — they have 
not the wit to grace mine with a paper coronet ; there would be 



OUR VILLAGE; OR, THE WANDERER'S RETURN. 235 

Last, and least, the slim exquisite, who, with a 
notable ambition, threw aside his manhood to fol- 
low fashion and the " clouded cane." — If, when he 
plays a love air on his Viol de Gamba in his mistress's 
boudoir, he sees a primrose, so familiar in his days of 
childhood, all his impertinence vanishes, and, return- 
ing home, he drives out Fashion's toyship from his 
heart, and dreams no more of Tom Little and his 
" Persian heaven " of black eyes and lemonade. f * 



Years, many, many, had passed away ! since the 
morning I left my native Rosewell, and bade adieu to 
kind hearts and virtuous pleasures, called by custom 
and necessity to go a wanderer through the world. 
Since then I had gradually risen to wealth and honour ; 
and had seen the cities, manners, crimes, splendours, 
and heartlessness, of various nations. The rose on my 
cheek had given place to the olive, and my hair was 
here and there shaded with the pale silver of the moon- 
beam. Indeed, my whole person had undergone a 
change ; and those who had formerly seen the wild un- 
tamed boy of health and nature, as he sported on the 
village common, would possibly have passed me by 
without recognition. Perhaps my mind, also, had par- 



some satire in that, Edward. I hope they will set it on the Scotch 
gate though, that I may look, even after death, to the blue hills of 
my own country, which I love so dearly." — Waverley, Vol. III. 
t So far this article has been before in print. 



236 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

taken of this change. For in my intercourse with 
mankind (as is generally the case) much of my early 
enthusiasm (though against my will) had been softened 
down into a more chastened feeling. 

But to make amends for my shorn rays, I had learnt 
to look beyond the surface of men and things, — a know- 
ledge in which, in my youth, I must confess I was not 
very well grounded ; and, besides this, I had become 
more cautious in proclaiming my likes and dislikes than 
formerly. Nevertheless, then, if the world, like the 
Israelites of old, had spoilt me of jewels of gold and 
jewels of silver, the treasures of my youthful mind — 
either through negligence in the search, or not deem- 
ing it worthy the capture — it (the world) had left 
me one gem in my casket unblemished — need I name 
it? — the love unaltered — unalterable, of my native 
village ! 

It was a fine morning in spring when I set out 
on foot from the neighbouring town towards Rose- 
well. And, oh ! none but the village born can tell 
the rapturous glow that plays in the bosom of him 
who, after having sojourned for years in the land of 
the stranger, is about to visit his native country once 
more ! For, after all, our village is our country, — 
there, and there alone — our affections — our friends — 
our early impressions are, — and there our heart is 
also ! Men talk of fighting — of dying for their 
county, — when, in reality, each means his own vil- 
lage ! If we think of a larger tract of territory, we 
feel naturally a sense of dreariness — a chill — we can- 



OUR VILLAGE; OR, THE WANDERER'S RETURN. 237 

not see it — and we view it as we view the countless 
stars of heaven — taken collectively, they may create 
our wonder, — never our esteem ! But for one of these 
little twinklers alone — we would live — we would fight — 
we would die ! 

Thus I thought, as milestone after milestone were 
left behind. A ray of my former enthusiasm had 
returned to me — and I was young again — and my heart 
warmed, as in fancy I interchanged my greetings with 
my early friends. What time, or death, had done since 
my absence, was never once thought of. But the de- 
lusion was heightened by picturing " as warm each 
hand, each brow as gay," as if I had only left them 
for a day. The music string of my soul was touched, 
and recollection responded in a strain infinitely sweet, 
like the wild melody of the 



" Shepherd's pipe upon the mountains, 
" When all his little flock's at feed before him ! 



For as I approached nearer, uprose, claiming the tri- 
bute of remembrance, the scene of some former friend- 
ship, or trophy of some boyish daring. Every tree, 
every hollow, every field, was associated with the past, 
and could tell its tale. It was holy ground ! Here, 
in that sloping field askant that clump of elms, I first 
met the parson's daughter, gathering blue bells and 
cowslips — and was so much stricken with her black 
eye of witchery (for it was a wicked, roguish eye !) that I 
discarded pudding and only eat once of meat for a month 



238 



HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 



after — out of pure love for her dear sake. To be sure, I 
got famously laughed at for my abstinence ; and many 
jokes arose out of the affair, (more renowned for the 
applause they met with in the repeatal, than for any 
intrinsic merit of their own) and were duly cracked at 
my expense, which to me was anything but a laughing 
matter at the time. 

There — a little further, was Farmer A 's orchard 

of cherries, smiling as it were wont with its clusters of 
pearly blossoms, and its rows of feathered pickers and 
stealers (not the only ones I ween!) suspended " in ter- 
rorem." Now this orchard was well known in my 
boyish annals for the raid of its cherries ; in which 
affair, to my confusion be it spoken, I was an actor ! 
Being induced one summer's evening to join a depra- 
datory excursion of my schoolfellows, whose ostensible 
object was to possess themselves of its fruit : an on- 
slaught was made, and we returned loaded with rosy 
spoil. Immediately on getting clear from the enemy's 
country, a council of war was called ; and it was deemed 
most prudent, by the seniors, to follow the example of 
Henry the Fifth, at Agincourt,* — id est — to devour 
our spoils ; the word was given to that effect — and be- 
fore you could say ■ John Dryden/ ever} 7 one of the 
cherries, stones and all, had vanished ! 

For we were too able diplomatists in that sort of 



" The French have reinforc'd their scatter'd men i 
Then every soldier kill his prisoners ; 
Give the word through." 

Henry, A. 4. S. 6. 



OUR VILLAGE; OR, THE WANDERER'S RETURN. 239 

thing to leave any trail behind us. Well, we returned 
to schooldom, thinking all was right ; but when sup- 
per came, we found all was wrong, as we were not able 
to touch a morsel — and as miracles were passed, or 
were at least esteemed as doubtful — the unusual " frag- 
ments that were left " created a suspicion in the sus- 
picious mind of the master, — so, in the end, we were 
all had up, and underwent a rigorous examination, 
which we managed to meet pretty well considering all 
things. When, as ill luck would have it, a half- saved 
urchin, with a turned down collar, and a mouth from 
ear to ear, who had partaken more greedily of the 
" spolia " than any of the others, either through fear, 
or some less creditable impulse, was suddenly seized 
with a griping in the bowels — and. instanter ! the very 
stones rose up in judgment against us ! — malgre our 
former declarations of innocence — the evidence was 
now too clear — it was astonishing ! and the master, 
after having bestowed upon us some hasty and howbeit 
hearty fisty cuffs by way of prefacitory matter, pro- 
ceeded to demonstrate the heinousness of our conduct, 
by arguments so smart and striking, that none of us, I 
believe, for the time to come, required the assistance 
of a Johnson to elucidate the difference between 
" meum " and " tuum." 

But, soft ! I have gained the upland, upon which 
Rosewell — my native Rosewell, is seated, basking in 
the sun, like some happy creature ! And already I 
feel her soft breathings of violet, primrose, and wild 
broom, as they kiss my cheek in welcome ! I 



240 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

come — I come, thou village of my yesterdays, and only 
tarry to survey thy kindred beauties at a distance, and 
then I am thine for ever ! Like one, who, when he 
unexpectedly meets a friend long thought lost, — at 
first, he stands in earnest — jealous gaze — misdoubting 
whether his senses have not deceived him. But when 
he sees it is really his beloved — he rushes and sinks 
ecstatic in his embrace ! 

Heavens, what a view ! — one of Nature's best after 
Claude Lorraine ! — a valley luxuriating in dell — in 
tree — in flower; — or rather an emerald set in the 
purest Venetian gold, — the yellow rays of tawdry 
Phoebus ; enclosed too, as if in a casket, by the distant 
hills, — themselves amethysts — 

" deeply, darkly, beautifully blue. " 

Through whose meads, the little brook, aspiring in some 
places to the name of river, (in its bubbles I had 
often plied the quiet art of Walton,) winds, like a 
serpent of silver, now seen, now lost amid brakes and 
bushes ; and anon, reeling over stone and stub, dancing 
to the melody of the sunbeam, it approaches like a 
tipsy Bacchanal, to surround that old hoary castle tower ; 
but, again, as if its very heart were touched by the mis- 
fortunes of the lonely ruin, which it had once seen in 
its battled glory, — it strikes off to the right, and to make 
amends for its former levity towards its old friend, 
flows so softly that not a murmur is heard from its 
waters for the next quarter of a mile. 



OUR VILLAGE; OR, THE WANDERER'S RETURN. 241 

That castle, too, — I must not forget it, — for it was 
in someway a friend to my boyhood, insomuch as the 
bullets, (memorials of olden fury,) which I picked up 
about its site, saved me many a pennyworth of 
marbles. Nevertheless, it was that species of friend, 
which is said, both by sage and simple, to be better far 
off than near, as the reputation it then bore was 
anything but creditable — for it was generally rumoured 
by the seers of the neighbourhood that the "old gentle- 
man " guarded, in person, a world's worth of treasure, 
supposed to lie perdue in one of its subterraneous 
passages. Furthermore, that when any one essayed to 
explore this passage — (such attempts had been made) — 
the abovementioned old gent., of sable habiliments, 
in the shape of a large raven, would uncivilly extin- 
guish the light of the fortune hunter, by flapping simul- 
taneously against it with his wings * * 



I turned from the view — and walked, or rather ran 
towards the village — my heart beating high with ex- 
pectation and hope, — I entered it — and found all my 
previous imaginings blighted ! — It was a cruel dis- 
appointment, — Time and Death had been busy, — and 
I walked a stranger in my native place ! 

In vain I looked around for the " old familiar faces:" 
their accustomed haunts were desolate, — they were 
not there ! Others came, but they were not the " Daft 
Jamie" and the " Mad Mary" I had known, — at whose 
infirmities and chatterings I had often, God forgive 

M 



242 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

me ! in the heyday of youth and happiness, laughed. 
The children, too ! — sunburnt prattlers ! — so wild — so 
mischievous — always to be seen about — what had be- 
come of them, that they did not welcome me, and cling 
to my skirts, as they were wont, for their accustomed 
piece of gingerbread, or halfpenny ? — I had some ready 
in my pockets ! 

Why, the boy had become the " father of the 
man ! " and the girl, the mother of the woman ! I 
sighed as reason pointed out this truth, and pro- 
ceeded further up the village — and soon approached 
my old school-house. — But how altered ! — I did 
not know it ! — A large blue board had been hitched 

to its venerable front, with *s " Academy for 

young Gentlemen" gilded on it. — " Academy!" — Well- 
a-day ! — But, silence, the clock strikes twelve ! and 
the door opens, and discharges the ** young Gentle- 
men " from their studies, in the shape of some six or 
seven sickly boys, with delicate sugar candied intelli- 
gences — who walked out listlessly, without manifesting 
joy, or any other excitement. Their clothes sedulously 
braided, and their caps adorned at the side with knots 
of black ribbon — all their thought being to keep the 
glow of their shoes from dirt in crossing the way, 
and to preserve the proper equilibrium of satchel and 
copy-book suspended, though they knew nothing of 
Horace, from their left shoulders.* 

* " Quo pueri magnis e centuriombus orti, 
Lsevo suspensi loculos tabulamque lacerto." 

Hot. Flac. Sat. 6. Lib. 1. 



OUR VILLAGE; OR, THE WANDERER'S RETURN. 243 

" 'Sdeath ! " my gage rose at these dishes of skim 
milk, who never, in their own minds, aspired to higher 
preferment than that of vending mutton pies with a 
bell ! — and I could restrain myself no longer, — 
" Hallo ! there, — why don't you run, shout, and bel- 
low, ye rascals ! like other schoolboys ? " On hearing 
this they sneaked off. 

What a contrast to schoolboys in my days ; then, as 

soon as our Dominie, old G , gave out his usual 

word of dismissal : "ye may go •'" we were regularly mad, 
and rushed out en masse, crowing, like chanticleer, 
with excess of joy; overturning, too, every man, 
woman, and child, that came in our way, and lashing 
our books and bags, like hail, about each other's ears. 
The Pedagogue now appeared at his door ; — a mean, 
bandy-legged biped, with gaiters under his trowsers. 
How different to his predecessor, and oh ! what would 
that predecessor have thought of such a disgrace to the 
calling of Dionysius ? He would have been half 
frantic: indubitably would have thrown his birchen 
sceptre away, and like other potentates, would have 
abdicated for retirement ; solacing himself with the 
patriotic sentiment, that when vulgarity and ignorance 
hold place and office, — 

" The post of honour is a private station." 

But poor G , alas ! poor G , he was gone — 

and I could have "better spared a better man." In 

my memory's memory I think I see him now, shaving 

M 2 



244 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

in the school room, as was his wont, before a little 
glass attached to a post. It was then, perhaps, an idle 
urchin would take advantage, and introduce some 
contraband pursuit, relying upon not being observed : 
such as twisting hair, scooping popguns, building paper 
boats, &c. But, woe to that luckless wight, and his 
precarious manufactions ; for the " shavee" would turn, 
and confronting the rebel with his lathered chin, would 
inflict "condign;" while the cry that followed told 
that " execution had been done on the youthful 
Cawdor ;" and, at the same time, was a warning to 
others, who were engaged in transactions of a like 
nefarious nature. 

Many times had I teazed him in that manner, and 
many times has he chastised me for so doing. Yet, on 
the whole, very kind was he to all of us ! and if he were 
sometimes seemingly severe, it was for our good : his 
views were just, 

" The love he bore to learning was in fault." 

Memory, too, at this length of time, does not disdain 
to call to mind, the kind, ample housekeeping of his 
jolly helpmate. For no niggard was she of spice or 
conserve, on the score of their dearness, in the com- 
position of her dishes; or substitutor of one thing for 
another, — as the too prevalent custom of some is, — no, 
she scorned such illiberal acts, for she herself was a 
mother; and her heart told her how she should have 
felt, if her own children, in a like situation, asking for a 



OUR village; or, the wanderer's return. 245 

fish, had received a serpent. It was true, hers was a 
plain wholesome cookery ; she did not often attempt 
the higher flights of the cuisine, but when she did her 
attempts received all the due ingredients which custom 
and Mrs. Glasse have prescribed. 

Thus her roast and boiled, always excellent in their 
way, (scorn not ye high ones, for her brother was 
a butcher,) were done to a nicety, as if their preparing 
had been regulated by a dial, and she had an honest 
pride that no joint should appear at table without its 
usual " attaches " of sauces and trimmings. Her apple 
dumplings, in my mind, were her chefs -d'ceuvres, and 
the day of their appearance was always looked for with 
delight; and, in their commendation be it said, I have 
since tasted the cates of many tables, — I may say of 
the great, — but never met their like. They were as 
round, and as snowy, as the orbs of beauty's bosom ! — 
with a clove, and a little slip of cinnamon, inserted in 
the middle, by way of zest, like the immortal essence 
in man's clay. And, if I remember right, her hashes, 
too, which only appeared on cold and frosty days, were 
peculiarly famous ; and their luscious gravy, strongly 
impregnated with spice and pepper, was especially 
adapted to create a comfortable warmth in beings like 
us, coming in, perchance, direct from sliding, or cover- 
ing one another with snow. But what is the good of 
speaking ? The warm bosoms of the good old man and 
his wife are now cold, and cruel death hath taken away 
my earliest, truest friends ; for to me, their hearts, — 
their praises, — their welcomes, — their hearths, — were 



246 



HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 



always warm, and, forgive the pun: "even in our 
hashes lived their wonted fires." 

My heart was full, and I walked away, but it was only 
to witness new changes and disappointments on every 
side. Some grasping hand had enclosed the common, 
on which universal suffrage had been allowed to the 
pigs, geese, children, and donkeys, of the neighbouring 
cottagers, from time immemorial; yes, and had wantonly 
cut down all the row of beautiful beech trees, — "all my 
pretty ones ! " did I say all ? — No, he had left one poor 
stunted thing, whose leaves moaned to the blast, like a 
chicken, when all its chuckling companions, (whom it had 
been brought up and nourished with, and in whose downy 
bosoms it had, perchance, nightly roosted its bill,) are 
killed, and it left lonely. There was little in this waste 
piece of ground to tempt his appropriating it. Its 
grass, half thistle, half dock, could be of small account 
to one like him, who possessed many arable meads and 
pastures. Yet he had taken from the poor, who had 
already too few privileges to boast of, their all ! How 
long will the poor thus allow their fellow worm to play 
the tyrant ? They sadly want some one to 

" shew them they are men. " 

My anger arose at this man, and the tempter was 
ready with a curse to curse him and his narrow soul ; 
but, my better angel, interposing, whipped the " offend- 
ing Adam " from my tongue, and the imprecation, 
expiring upon my lips, melted into a tear ! No, I 



OUR VILLAGE; OR, THE WANDERER' S RETURN. 247 

could not curse him, — let his conscience do that, — 
notwithstanding, he had, by destroying one of my early 
associations, added a pang to a broken-hearted man, 
who, having been a long time, — too long, — from his 
natal village, returning, found the chain which had 
bound him to his early friends, and which he thought 
was wrought of iron, broken ! and all its links, as 
if only of perishable straw, dissolved and gone. Again, 
the Public, — in whose neat sanded tap-room I had fre- 
quently of a winter's evening convened with other 
schoolfellows to listen to the aged peasants as they 
told over their cyder their wondrous tales of long ago, 
— was pulled down, although, engraved by flame of 
candle, (much to the scandal of the hostess,) my 
name 

" stood rubric on the wall." 



And even the lion, on the old weather-beaten sign post, 
who, by all accounts, had borne his faculties very 
meekly, had disappeared; while a new cognizance, pur- 
porting to be the " Arms/' usurped its place. — 

Sic transit ! 

But the " unkindest cut of all" was the old post ,which, 
whilom stood before the ale-house door, that too, had 
been swept away in the general demolition, and not a 
mark remained to shew where it once stood. Now, 
the desecrator who laid it low might have considered 
for a moment, before he issued his fiat for its destruc- 
tion, that he was about to destroy the associations of a 



248 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

century, — for my wooden favourite had seen full as 
many years, — as every ragged urchin in the village, 
father and son, for two generations, had sat astraddle 
on its summit, to " ride the cock horse." Even I, 
myself, had rode on it, and had once gone the unpar- 
donable length of appropriating the cords of my own 
bedstead to make stirrups, to do so more naturally and 
effectively. 

This, and the preceding disappointments, had so 
scathed my feelings, that I shrank from further investi- 
gation ; and, from dread of other early bankruptcies, 
turned into a green lane, and, before I was aware of it, 
found myself entering the park -like gate which opened 
into the gardens of the vicarage. I started, for when 
I was last there, it was with one whom my youthful 
imaginings had pictured as my future bride, — the wife 
of my after years, — she was not so : — but somewhat 
too much of that. 

Time, which had so changed other objects, had made 
very little alteration here, except that the shrubs had 
sprung up and overshadowed the building ; the flowers 
were adjusted with as much care as formerly, — the 
eglantine and rose were bound in nuptial bands as they 
used to be, — and the gravel walk was as free from weeds 
as ever, — but where, oh where, was she who made that 
walk so agreeable ? "I came," says the wanderer of 
the little oriental legend, " I came to the place of my 
birth and cried : ' the friends of my youth where are 
they ? And an echo answered, where ? ' " 

My emotions now were too bitter to linger longer, 



OUR VILLAGE; OR, THE WANDERER'S RETURN. 249 

so I retraced my steps, the very birds breaking my 
heart with the melody of the past, — 

" How can ye chaunt ye little birds, 

An' I sae f u' o' care ? 
Thou'lt break my heart, thou bonnie bird, 

That sings upon the bough, 
Thou minds me o' the happy days." — 

— I closed the gate, and gave a last " fare thee well" 
to the scenes it enclosed ; for I felt I never could enter 
it again, — I never did. 

One melancholy task more remained, previous to my 
leaving Rosewell, (now become painful to me,) for ever. 
It was to visit the silent dwelling of my first and only 
love. I was soon at the little churchyard, and one leg 
was lifted across the stile to get over, (I had often 
vaulted it in happier times,) when I paused, to take the 
shoes from off my feet, as I was going among my early 
friends ; for dead or alive, those that were, still are, our 
friends ; and from no where does friendship speak more 
warmly for remembrance and respect, than from the 
tomb ! 

Here, many were those whom I had personally 
known, while some had been my playmates and my 
schoolfellows. But I had no time to note these 
" sermons on stones," my whole soul being taken up 
with the finding of one grave, — I found it, — a plain virgin 
tablet ; no epitaph spoke in praise, but some kindred 
spirit had planted a lily root in the green sod, which 
was now in snowy blossom, — a fit emblem of the inno- 
m 3 



250 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

cence that slept below, — I knelt down, — yes, the lily and 
the wanderer were alone on the grave of the beautiful ! 
and the wind rising, as it rattled against the old gothic 
windows of the church, passed over the spot in 
mockery — moaning — 

" She is nothing, wherefore is he here ?" 

:jc * * * * ^e • * * * 



THE SUBLIME AND THE RIDICULOUS. 



"Shallow. Certain, 'tis certain ; very sure, very sure : death, as 
the psalmist saith, is certain to all; all shall die. — How a good yoke 
of bullocks at Stamford fair ?" 

Second part of Henry IV. 



The difference between the sublime and the ridicu- 
lous is generally considered as that of one extreme to 
another ; fire, in antithesis to water, — north, to south. 
But in reality the one, (the sublime,) is but a previous 
stage of the chrysalid ; or, to speak plainly, the ridicu- 
lous is nothing more than the sublime grown old, with 
its well-formed leg, become the spindle stretcher 
of lamb's-wool, or worsted. To exemplify this : — the 
whole existence of man is nothing but an arena, where 
these two qualities, pitted against each other, are con- 
tinually fighting for the mastery ; and all of us 
have at some part of our lives exhibited very fair speci- 
mens of each, without being conscious, like the sand 
of the amphitheatre at Rome, of possessing either. 
And these exhibitions mostly take place at different 



252 



HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 



periods of our existence, though neither is always pecu- 
liar ; but each indiscriminate ; according to the end 
and beginning of things : — as, what is sublime in 
commencement, very often becomes lame and impotent 
in conclusion. And what was ridiculous in initio, 
frequently mellows into sublimity by age. Thus, the 
daring deed and enthusiasm of youth are sublime ; 
while the garrulity and exaggeration of age are ridicu- 
lous. The boyhood and after years of Richard the 
Second are an example of this hypothesis in men ; — 
the launch, and subsequent wreck of the Spanish 
Armada, in things. Yet, mutatis mutandis, it does 
not follow that every man's life is a fac simile of the 
unfortunate white rose's ; or that every one's specula- 
tion should partake of the ridiculous termination of his 
of Spain. As, in corroboration: the young fool some- 
times becomes the old sage ; — the youthful libertine, 
the staid man ; witness the memorable instance of 
Harry Monmouth, whose early days, his biographer 
tells us, were those of one who did not scruple to rob 
the exchequer of travellers with '• unwashed hands ;" 
but who, in maturer years, allowed " consideration " to 
whip 

" the offending Adam out of Mm ;* 



again, the birth of every man, be he hero, pickpocket, 
or sage, is ridiculous. Behold, the wee, cross -looking, 
lump of flesh, with as much expression as a roasted 
apple; then its concomitants, the stiff-coiffed nurse, 



THE SUBLIME AND THE RIDICULOUS. 253 

and the .solemn, red-nosed Dr. ; the former, narrowly 
watching the progress of the latter, who, conscious of 
being an intruder, steals about a thing forbid. So much 
for the birth of man. But, as if to make amends, the 
death in almost every instance, has a particle of sub- 
limity about it; for solemnity is sublimity, modified 
and chastened. And even the last moments of those 
who in life were associated only with ridicule are not 
divested of it. Thus, no one reads the latter ends of 
Don Quixote and Falstaff,— the one, touchingly abjur- 
ing his former folly ; the other, " making a finer end/' 
and going away, "an it had been a christom child," — 
without feeling something like a sensation steal o'er 
the heart, and a wish that " Goodman Bones " had 
laid low any other twain than the Knight of the rueful 
countenance, and " sweet Jack Falstaff." This, how- 
ever, may proceed more from the contrast between 
their death and their lives, than any real sympathy for 
the loss of the men ; — though we are apt to love those 
who have made us laugh. 

As of the influence these two qualities exercise over 
the entrances and exits of mankind, so may it be said 
of before and after marriage. The first so pure — the 
parties themselves so amiable — distant emanations of 
future honey — loves of the Angels, &c. The last — 
so impure, the " miserable sinners " concerned, so 
pitiful — cat and dog for the present — the New River 
and prussic acid in prospective ! 

There are some instances, however, where the end 
and the beginning partake equally of one of these quali- 



254 



HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 



ties, and are virtually the same; though this rarely 
happens, and is altogether confined to things, as the 
very volatile disposition of man nullifies the application 
when applied to him. Exempli gratia : — The rising 
and setting of the sun are equally grand and sublime ; 
though the one is the sublimity of happiness; the 
other of sorrow. While, on the other hand, the play- 
fulness of the kitten, and the whiskered gravity of the 
cat, are both alike ridiculous. 

It has been said by one,* who well exemplified the 
truism in his own actions : " That there is but one 
step from the sublime to the ridiculous;" and he might 
have added — but there are many points from which 
that step might be taken ; and many ways by which 
things, originally grand, become little, — the sublime 
the ridiculous, and the ridiculous, in its turn, the sub- 
lime : — as, for instance, by dress — by personal appear- 
ance — by party prejudice — by parody — by names — and, 
lastly, by the use of certain words and actions. 

By dress. — Nothing is a greater counter apotheosis 
than a slovenly habit of dress. Of the deifying quali- 
ties of costume our modern actors are well aware, and 
always take care that their characters, never mind what 
perils they have to go through, shall be well dressed. 
Among the ancients, Caesar appears particularly to 
have paid attention to the value of outward seeming ; 
well knowing that a disregard of it will often throw a 
shade of mockery over the highest and the most awful 
moments ! Hence, he constantly wore a wreath to 

* Napoleon. 



THE SUBLIME AND THE RIDICULOUS. 255 

conceal the baldness of his head, the which did not 
escape the remarks of the satirists of the day ; for we 
are told, his own soldiery, on one occasion — a trium- 
phal procession — openly reproached him for his scarcity 
of hair : crying out — " Calvum mcechum, ducimus Ca- 
sarem: mariti, servate uxor est" Nor did his penchant for 
this essential stop here ; for when expiring under the 
" styluses " of his murderers, with the consideration of 
Pope's lady, who says : " one would not look quite 
shocking when one's dead," he, as every one knows, 
adjusted his robe that he might fall gracefully. This 
terror of the ridiculous, at such a moment, is not very 
well understood by us moderns, who are not heroes, or 
Romans ; but still it substantiates the dogma, that 
" dress," as our friend Acres has it, " does make a dif- 
ference," ah ! and a great difference, too. For clothe 
a man in a toga, and he becomes a hero, — disfigure 
him in a night cap, and "visum teneatis amici?" 
Again, the conception of Richard the Third, as com- 
monly played, in his slashed and jewelled vest, is sub- 
lime, — play the same character in an old militia red 
coat, and the house would be in a roar of laughter. 
The same maybe said of painting : — let an artist por- 
tray Eve in her fig-leaf shorts, and connoisseurs will 
praise the roundness of that arm, — the beautiful turn 
of that leg, — and, in a word, will expend mouthfulls of 
encomia on the picture and its painter. But should 
the same sinner, thinking of her who bore him, and 
out of charity for the exposed charms of our frail mo- 
ther, assume the office of lady's maid, and clothe her in 



256 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

a hooped petticoat, and other Anne-uities* — why he 
and his protege would be laughed at from one month's 
end to the other. 

By personal appearance. — Next to dress in making 
man ridiculous, is his own personal appearance. For 
the world, that sighed over the sorrows of a handsome 
Byron, with " forehead high and pale," would view with 
great equanimity, and perhaps with a broad grin, the 
like sufferings resulting to one, who, with all the talents 
of the first, happened to be damned with a hump back, 
or a bottle nose. Furthermore, should we happen to 
stumble on a handsome stripling, pleading his love 
tale on bended knees to his mistress, we, of course, 
make off as stealthily as a cat, not to interrupt him ; — 
but, on the contrary, should the idolater be an old or 
ugly man, we do not budge a step, but holding both 
our sides, give vent to a long and hearty cachinnation. 
In like manner, should a graceful spectre, at one of the 
fashionable assemblies, invite a young lady to waltz, she 
instantly assents, and, incontinently, is seen spinning 
round like a rat on the pivot of a pension. But sup- 
pose a Sir John Sack-and-sugar is the applicant, — the 
provoking damsel not only laughs herself, but commu- 
nicates it to her companions. 

Party prejudice. — After the two former laughter- 
makers, comes party prejudice, which, mocking fiend 
as it is, can so twist and so pervert the words and ac- 
tions of those of a different creed, that, to speak in par- 

* i.e. Costume of Queen Anne. 



THE SUBLIME AND THE RIDICULOUS. 257 

liamentary phrase, it often causes a man's deeds, really 
respectable in themselves, to be greeted with " much 
laughter," when they ought of right to be hailed with 
" cheers." 

By parody. — This is frequently the weapon of the 
foregoing. Its principles consist in skilfully turning 
the chefs -d'ceuvres of celebrated authors into burlesque, 
and by the desecration of them, by what are called 
" Hamiltonian Translations," " New Readings of Old 
Authors," &c. &c, causing the world to think contemp- 
tuously of those witching passages, which previously 
they adored and worshipped. It is from this infamous 
system of mockery that many of the speeches of our 
finest poets have been stripped of the sanctity of 
genius with which time had long invested them ! 

By names. — A Gubbins could never, malgre his 
capabilities for the feat, have written a Childe Harold ; 
at least, if he had written it, he would have been 
ashamed to have published it with his patronymic in 
the title page : — only fancy, for a moment, " Childe 
Harold," a poem, not by Lord Byron, but by James 
Gubbins ! ! Poor fellow ! the name would inevitably 
have consigned it in its birth to the greasy digits of 
trunk makers, bacon venders, and other unwashed ar- 
tizans ! Yet, notwithstanding this, Juliet still con- 
tinues to ask, in the person of some pretty actress, 
" What's in a name?" Foolish query: — the answer 
is obvious — every thing ! but, as we wish the response 
to bear on our present argument, we shall content our- 
selves with replying " ridicule and admiration." Take 



258 HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 

an example, — call the Devil, Lucifer, in the dialect of 
Milton, and he is sublime, — mc^name him ■ Old Goose- 
berry,' and * the Deuce,' in the patois of the simple, 
and what remains of the awful grandeur of him whose 
form the poet sings — 

u had yet not lost 

All her original brightness, nor appear'd 
Less than Arch Angel rnin'd ." 

Nothing, indubitatively nothing ! — he is then a mere 
bugbear, a raw-head and bloody-bones, to scare nursery- 
maids and children. Such is the divinity of nomen- 
clature, — yet its infallibility may be impugned, — par- 
ticularly when connected with localities : as, would not 
the battle of Thermopylae equally have had the ad- 
miration of posterity, had it been fought at Norton 
Falgate? and had thirty-five of the three hundred 
Lacedaemonians been 

" Englishmen of pith, 



Sixteen called Thomson, and nineteen named Smith ! " 

By certain words and actions, — sneezing in a love 
speech, — stumbling over a chair when going to greet a 
friend, — blowing the nose in an ebullition of grief, and 
the nasus coming through the hole in the pocket-hand- 
kerchief, &c, together with the use of all odd gaits, 
phrases, and gestures, and such like ; which never fail 
to make a man appear ridiculous, let him be ever so well 
favoured, or high in rank. And so severely is the 



THE SUBLIME AND THE RIDICULOUS. 259 

slightest deviation from propriety visited by the gene- 
rality of mankind, especially in public characters, that 
the Actor, who, with folded arms, electrifies in "to be 
or not to be," should he repeat the same speech with 
his hands under his coat tails, would instantly be 
hissed off the stage as a vulgar dog. Again, the greatest 
hero, committing certain solecisms, would be ridiculous. 
Alexander blowing a trumpet response on his nose, — 
Caesar, crying like a " sick girl " — 

" give me some drink, Titinius." 






A WELSH WATERING PLACE. 



" More discontents I never had, 
Since I was born, than here ; 
Where I have been, and still am sad, 
In this dull Devonshire." 



Herrick's "Discontents in Devon." 



Of all places in this world of ours, the Lord defend 
me from a small watering place, and above all from a 
small Welsh Watering Place ; where you are expected 
to bring, like a discarded servant, your character for 
opulence, from your last place, and never to demur at 
any demands of the natives, let them be ever so 
extortionate ; but, on the contrary, to submit to be 
cheated like a gentleman ; for if you do not, and are the 
least refractory, impromptu you are overwhelmed with 
a shower-bath of abuse, and, in no measured terms, re- 
minded of the day, when, descending from steamer or 
from carriage, you first did, 

" Wi' reekit duds, an' reestit gizz, 

present your smoutie phiz, 

'Mang better fo'k. — " 



A WELSH WATERING PLACE. 261 

Once again, I say, the Lord defend me from a small 
Welsh Watering Place ! Where the inhabitants are a 
unanimous bunch of lodging-house keepers ; the better 
part of them (malgre their present consequence,) like 
Byron's heroine, " born in the garret, in the kitchen 
bred," diluted with a small solution of young men in 
sailor's jackets, looking very unlike gentlemen ; and 
ditto young women, with rows of pink ribbon up their 
gowns, looking very unlike ladies. 

Where the master of the ceremonies, Beau Nash in 
impudence and his own opinion, stalks about of a morn- 
ing, in an undress of a green jockey surtout, much too 
small, and white " filthy dowlas" trowsers, much too 
large ; and of an evening — for the animal dresses for 
dinner, instead of having dinner dressed for him, — thus 
economically deciding for back, versus belly, — in an 
old rusty coat, once black, but now any colour you 
please to flatter it with, a world too large, or small, 
— according as the person of its former possessor 
may have been, — for your Cambrian " magister 
morum" always has his garniture, a la Sir Charles 
Wetherell, second hand, or gratis, as his perquisite, for 
introducing strangers to those whom they perfectly 
well knew before, and pocketing the expectation of a 
guinea, which he never receives. 

Where, in continuation, the sole occupations of the 
company are, — for the men, shooting all the morning, 
at birds, which they always miss ; and sailing in water 
omnibusses, mis-named yachts, which they always hit — 
against the rocks : for the women, picking up loads of 



262 



HUMOUR AND PATHOS. 



oyster shells, and loads of scandal ; peering for the 
packet, to see if they can descry on its deck any fools 
as great as themselves ; and spelling over (for they are 
literary,) " The Children of the Abbey ;"" 'Twas right 
to Marry Him; or the History of Miss Petworth," 
and other equally veracious and delectable productions 
of Newman, and the Minerva Press. 

Where the shops sell every thing but what you ask 
for, and meet as much encouragement as an Irish 
beggar woman, with six children, a bunch of matches, 
and a blind husband. Where the bells ring for every 
thing inclusive, short of the Mayor's cat kittening. 
Where a perfect gentleman is hunted out of the place, 
as if he were a Cherokee Indian, armed with scalping 
tools and tomahawk. Where the women wear breeches 
to protect their legs from observation, which is never 
taken of them but by themselves ; and where, in short, 
if a man have not a penchant for parading, like the 
sentinel in Sheridan's Pizarro, ten hours of the day, on 
a barren ridge of sand, knee deep, to muse — 



o'er flood and fell, 



he may be as miserable as any lover could conscien- 
ciously wish. 



FINIS. 



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